Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure."
Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp... it's assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A lot of financial transactions are conducted by doing a bank transfer and then sending the receipt via WhatsApp. The schools send essential messages to parents via WhatsApp. During lockdowns, stores were taking delivery orders via WhatsApp.
What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I'm still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can't disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.
[Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.
I like to think the problem is that "the nerds" have failed the rest of the people. People used to listen to us about computer stuff. Then computers became usable without us. Then smartphones arrived. We gladly were relieved of our obligations, but also of our influence.
It's too late to go back. People are already used to the trade-offs, convenience rules above all. People may be "sort of concerned" about privacy, but they shrug it off. If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.
I think it’s simpler. Boycotts don’t work at an individual level. I have been boycotting nestle for decades. Can’t say they’ve become less evil. That’s because the marginal effect is negligible for them and strongly negative for the individual (assuming you’re a fan of Kit Kat’s).
Network effects amplify the marginal impact on the individual, because they lead to a monopoly with no true competition. Sure, you can leave whatsapp for signal, but you can’t talk to that community group on WhatsApp from signal. From an individual’s point of view the market power is an absolute monopoly.
The only solution to these problems is organising to the level of a mass boycott, or regulatory intervention. The former is impossible because too many people don’t care about the company’s behaviour (not because they’re ignorant, they just don’t care) and the latter is slow and a very hard and unfun pursuit for campaigners.
Nothing we say to non nerds will be of sufficient magnitude on an individual level. It’d have to be collective action.
Personally I’m far more worried about Facebook undermining democracy right now. That’s sufficient reason to shut them down.
That would seriously break the network effect and eventually kill them off. Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc got popular because they where free and easy to use. However, the market is really fickle and network effects can kill stuff off really quickly.
WhatsApp is already DOA in my circle of friends, it might come back but the odds aren’t great.
The WhatsApp network effect is strongly tied to borders though. Almost no one uses it in New Zealand for example, but a lot of people use Facebook Messenger but it isn't completely dominant like WhatsApp is in some places. I wonder if it ties back to countries that have good value cell phone plans? Even the very cheapest plans here come with unlimited SMS and it's been that way since smartphones were first taking off.
I think you're understating the strength of weak connections. If I have even one friend who's not on Whatsapp that I want to stay in touch with then I'm going to download another app. If there's a group chat with this person then everyone in that group is downloading a second app. And then second degree and third degree connections get affected too.
Getting out of the EU would be a massive blow to any established social media company that depends on network effects. It doesn't matter as much for smaller companies that are still growing (eg. early Facebook still managed to grow by only offering services to college students).
Is it not reasonable to demand interoperability for one of the main methods of communication in the entire world?
Forcing a specific standard is problematic, but it would be reasonable to ask any communication service to provide a fully documented and public API with features and access equal to the features and access of the official application.
Random nerds make integrations to whatever application/protocol is in vogue, business still gets to have complete freedom in where their take their API and thus their product.
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I would even go as far as to say that every web-service should be machine-consumable in that fashion, but that's beyond the point.
They probably shouldn't mandate "how technology works". I certainly wouldn't vote for that.
However, I think that public services (paid for by taxes) should be open and accessible. That is, the government should mandate certain properties ("it should be open") and not certain implementations ("it should use this specific protocol / app").
Another commenter gave the example of Brazil schools sending parents important information via WhatsApp.
Now I'm not against the schools doing that if it's one of multiple options and if the parents have an actual choice. I think the government should mandate that at least one open choice be made available, without necessarily detailing said choice.
In my view this wouldn't stifle innovation. If you come up with some new communication app that's better than anything else, if it's open and many people pick it up, there's no reason for the schools not to use it instead of the older / inferior option. This would also allow schools to choose one among several open solutions according to their particular needs.
Because innovative != ethical!
Hopefully it would stifle innovation that depends on tracking users and platform lock-in. I think there would certainly be space for innovation beyond that, possibly with even better conditions for competition as it would be easier for users to move between platforms.
Governments exist in large part to solve problems of the form "all individuals are incentivised to take actions which, when universally taken, are detrimental to the commons".
I am not sure it is a problem for most people though, if anything I believe most people would not like the alternative.
If the choice is between being tracked, which results in many things being free (as in beer) with otherwise almost no practical visible consequences for most people (different ads?), or having to pay for each and every service but no tracking, I think you would face a huge backlash if you forced the latter.
A solution could be to have free access if you accept tracking and pay otherwise, but I believe this is illegal under GDPR.
Who do you think that allocates frequency spectrum? Imagine if every mobile phone company wanted to lock its users by operating on a specific frequency.
Imagine if Hollywood or TV studios had any saying over Digital TV standards. Streaming would never exist and we would be used to a "pay-per-view" model forever, with mandatory and built-in DRM.
This is not about enforcing how technology works. It just ensuring that no monopoly can occur. Common standards don't stifle innovation, closed ones do.
We would have been much worse off if governments, or governmental bodies like the UN, allocated IP addresses rather than a private anarcho-like entity.
How does allocation of IP addresses related to pushing for interoperability of communication protocols?
If your analogy was something about governmental bodies was worse than private entities when pushing for a standard network standard, then you would have a point. But unless I am deeply wrong, TCP/IP, GSM, LTE, DVB, even FM radio and PAL were standards that only became dominant after governmental bodies sanctioned as standards and no one misses AppleTalk or Novell's IDP because of "government meddling".
Even still, the argument is not for killing private protocols or stopping private companies to innovate and develop new technologies. It's "just" that these innovations should be made on top of open standards instead of displacing them. Don't forget that Google Talk and even Facebook's messenger started on top of XMPP. They closed purely for business reasons, not technical ones. Had the FCC told them "do whatever you want with your network and your client, but anyone speaking XMPP should be able to communicate with your users", we wouldn't be in this mess.
I generally agree with this sentiment, but sometimes I think mandating cooperation between walled gardens is the only way to help consumers. Take healthcare for example: Epic, Cerner, Athena, etc all have NO incentive to build any interoperability into their products. It greatly benefits them to create walled gardens and wall-off hospitals and healthcare institutions from other institutions that use their competitors' software.
It took Congress to mandate open standards and to spell out that healthcare institutions must offer a public APIs to patients. We are only now starting to be able to download health records from hospitals as a result of this despite it being technically possible for decades. In fact there are still many patients that are required to request stacks of DVDs containing their health records, and this is their only option.
Obviously this is more a commentary on how shitty healthcare in the US can be, but also a good example IMO of how sometimes government intervention in technical standards requirements can greatly benefit consumers.
Market competition doesn't work for natural monopolies, and network effects mean messaging is one of those. Governments should regulate as necessary to ensure free markets for competition, which means aggressive antitrust enforcement and giving natural monopolies the choice between opening up enough to allow competition, or nationalisation.
Forcing interoperability means the apps need to actually compete with each other by being better - rather than just by being the biggest incumbent. Restrictions and requirements can boost innovation.
The EU cannot force anything. It would be enough for the company that provides WhatsApp to not have any business in the EU (today that's FB, it could be a spinoff tomorrow).
The only, weak, solution would be to force the EU ISPs, on an European level, to block FB. Blocking on itself will not be easy (technically speaking) and good luck to have a consensus on that among our countries.
I completely fail to understand why many US companies, operating on US grounds care about GDPR at all. I would not and, please, sue me. Even the ones that block access from EU are overreacting.
Rosa Parks was a militant activist and part of a large activist network that was consistently staging public acts in defiance of Jim Crow segregation. This is misleadingly left out of most folks’ intro to her most successful action.
My school system was always big on emphasizing that there were pre-cursors to Rosa Parks (like Claudette Colvin), but they didn't have the connections that she did to make it happen.
Another factor is that the black people that were mainly affected by the segregation were the primary funders of the bus system. Their boycott was incredibly significant to the bottom line.
When employees want to have more say over their working conditions, they organize. If users want to have more say over the product conditions, is there an opportunity to organize as wel?
Eh, it's not like "the nerds" can build a better product in terms of UX anyway, and definitely can't market it better.
Besides, who says "the nerds" are trustworthy anyway? They keep arguing among each other about which operating system or programming language is best, and why should we take their advice when software security vulnerabilities keep being discovered?
Not disagreeing with your point - it's become too easy to just randomly click "agree" on any TOS and trade away your privacy/security for convenience - but don't make it an "us vs them" type of thing. To me, this is purely corporate interest being prioritized ahead of public needs because most politicians either have no spine or answer to lobbyists more than the common person.
> Eh, it's not like "the nerds" can build a better product in terms of UX anyway, and definitely can't market it better.
Um, the original WhatsApp company was pretty much run by nerds, I thought, who made a product with UX so good they organically built a user base so large that FaceBook paid $16 billion for the company?
The service even cost money. A chat service for which you paid money to use. That was actually the argument why a lot of people used it, because "if you're paying for it, you know that they don't have shady business practices"
The only thing that surprises me is how long this change took. I expected them to do this when they removed the subscription.
"The nerds" tend to think logically and extrapolate without regard for reasonableness, precedent, or social norms. That makes us pretty bad at a lot of things (and we blow a lot of our credibility that way) but, it turns out, pretty good at predicting how corporations will abuse technology.
Kind of want to agree, but you're comparing the extremes on both sides. The truth is somewhere in-between, and consider that for mainstream products like WhatsApp or Windows or whatever, the general public never deal with actual salesmen, just word of mouth and marketing.
Maybe they didn't fail us...
Wikipedia: On February 21, 2018, Moxie Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the formation of the Signal Foundation
They failed us to sell WhatsApp to FB while the networks effects are (at least in Europe) in full effect. I simply can't abandon WhatsApp due to this now.
Convenience > Privacy, which is an interesting conundrum.
This makes privacy a feature more than a USP (unique selling proposition). I predict that some "privacy" focused products and search engines will need to pivot to something more than just "we don't steal your data."
I disagree with where and how this industry failed the rest of people. I can quote you numerous "nerds", such as the esteemed (/s) Eric Emerson Schmidt that told us on a public podium that it is unreasonable to have "an expectation of privacy "(a technical legal phrase, btw) when using the internet. So let's not blame this on the "smart phone" and usability.
In the late 80s and 90s, we had influential technologists that sold what became the Panopticon as a liberating force that would unleash creativity and usher in a new era of freedom. Most now work for one of the FANGs. The rest made a face saving effort via EFF.
> If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.
Which VCs would fund them? VCs, even our gracious hosts YCombinator, are gate keepers of who & what gets funding.
Has YCombinator, with genuine educated and well informed geeks at the helm, ever supported a decentralized proposal?
Consumers can only choose from what is on the menu.
And "privacy conscious" competitors were not on the menu. Or maybe I did miss these. This is possible, so can you point out which VC funded "privacy conscious" startups failed against competing venture funded centralized systems?
To this day, non-geeks are not aware that it is possible for them to have their social apps while insuring their privacy.
Everybody uses Whatsapp. It is now so entrenched into society that it turned to be part of its popular culture. When people say "I'm part of a group of old car enthusiasts", they meant they are part of a Whatsapp group in which they discuss old cars.
Countless online services and apps were replaced by Whatsapp over the years, from the top of my head: all IMs, customer service apps, e-commerce (specially for SMBs), email and collaboration in general. I can't remember the last time I received a proposal or contract to be signed outside Whatsapp. My attorney asks me to send him all sorts of documentation, copies of IDs and legal evidence via Whatsapp because email is not as easy to use as the IM.
Well, it's lunch time. I got to order my Burguer King meal via their Whatsapp order taking bot. How convenient.
WhatsApp reigns supreme in India as well; we now have characters in TV shows and movies saying lines like, "I will WhatsApp you the details." WhatsApp might be Zuck's most significant purchase for global domination (at least for now).
Exactly. Facebook and WhatsApp likely have very little to worry about. Zuck knows that most users will keep using WhatsApp. However it does show that Facebook is not doing so well. The fact they need WhatsApp user data indicates problems in their "core" product.
I'm having a hard time understanding how WhatsApp could be convenient enough to replace most online services and apps. Do you send text messages with some magic keywords to order at Burger King, or is there a person on the other end reading it, or how does that work? How do you pay? How do you browse the menu? I don't understand.
In Central America whatsapp also _is_ basically the Internet along with facebook. There is a person on the other end taking your order and payments are always done in cash, although some advanced delivery drivers now carry a credit card swipe machine. Everything is done through whatsapp: bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications for children in schools, business introductions (dont know anyone who uses email for this over there). The Internet is whatsapp for these people, there is no such thing as "most online services and apps"
Thank you all for shining a light on this. I didn't know this was so bad. I'm simply annoyed that some social groups use Facebook to organize, our neighborhood group, the parenting class, so I just can't be a part of that and try to move individual people, like my immediate neighbors, onto other platforms. But "bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications", that's extreme.
At least for bills and govt services I wonder, who approves something like that?
My kids' school has 3 different learning management systems (not integrated, BTW) to which students need to submit their homework/assignments. Well, at least in theory.
In practice, parents take photos of homework and send them to teachers via Whatsapp completely ignoring a formal system maintained for that purpose. Poor teachers have to save the time to upload files from their phones/computers to the system later and keep things organized from school's internal perspective.
I thought about proposing to school's IT that they changed the process, allowing parents to email files to a certain inbox, which an app would collect the files later and push them into the system automatically. I ended up not going ahead with the proposal because I already knew their reaction to me: "Whatsapp makes the process simpler".
I've worked in technical support in Central America and there's something I noticed with some users. Like those younger than 25 y/o users or older than 65 y/o.
For them, their phone is their first computer and they never really used e-mail.
Some of them can't recall their e-mail addresses or less their e-mail passwords.
This happens even if Android is the most popular phone and requires a GMail account to be properly set up.
They just create a new GMail account when they get a new phone or somtimes just keep using the GMail account from the previous owner instead.
It works similar to talking to a robot via voice call. When you start the chat with the bot it will answer with a standard message saying things like "Hi, welcome to XXX" and present you with a fixed menu of options like "type 1 to create a new order" or "type 2 to inquire about an existing order" and so on. At certain points the chat may be transferred to a human.
Some places might also try to use a more clever bot where you write down what you want and the bot gives a canned response if it thinks it understands what you meant (often just looking at keywords). These can be frustrating to use, just like those voice call bots that use voice recognition.
> Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp...
In my circles WhatsApp usage was pervasive and I was one of those who really pushed for it.
Soon after it became obvious that Facebook was still Facebook even with WhatsApp on board we started pushing for Telegram (remember this was probably before Signal existed in its current form and long before Matrix became mainstream.)
It took two years or so calendar time, a few hours work I think - mostly advocacy - and included moving people from early teenage to late eighties, but was mostly painless and definitely worth it because of usability alone, even if the most important point was to keep our social graps out of the hands of future Cambridge Analyticas and whoever else Facebook wants to sell it to. (And I've hopefully learned not to underestimate grannies..!)
Today I'd probably pushed for Matrix, but as mentioned above that was not an option then.
Signal is also really nice despite one or a few big security problems (remotely exploit in the desktop client being the big one for me). Also it is US centric with all the problems that comes with it, it prioritizes security above everything and UX actually suffers from it and it isn¨t open, so as far as I can see we are locked in should they turn bad.
Whole Central and South America is like this actually. I have travelled to many countries. Often this is the only way to get a hospital appointment, and I prioritize my health over privacy from Facebook.
this single post would be grounds for nationalization/breakup/conversion to utility status for me. i wouldn't believe this if there weren't so many of you saying the same thing here. it's unthinkable for me to send any kind of confidential information via whatsapp.
> What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
It's zero-rating, which is a loophole to go around most net neutrality laws. Governments would have to patch that loophole or enforce a stricter interpretation of net neutrality laws, but then everybody would hate them because they'd be banning free stuff.
WhatApp is so prevalent in El Salvador that it would be very inconvenient not to use it. It's by far the preferred communciation service.
It's also the cheapest. Because its free with WiFi, and cost less than US$1.00 per day with a data plan. Compare that to phone calls that cost about US$ 0.15 per minute or SMS that cost US$ 0.06. It may not seem much, but when you factor the local minimum wage in urban areas: $1.87/hour or US$ 0.03/minute the difference becomes significant.
Perhaps the closest alternative here would be Telegram. It has niche users like government, NGOs, political organizations and group chats for people with similar interests (like Facebook groups are used in some countries).
I guess, WhatsApp has become like our tropicalized version of WeChat.
Its used to chat with friends, family, group chats (leaving a group chat unannounced is a big faux pas). Almost every class gets a WhatsApp group for coordinating coursework.
Most stores and restaurants, big and small, accept orders via Whatsapp and that way one can avoid the third party app delivery fees. It is also used to send bank transfer confirmations, and gps location pins to coordinate deliveries because our addressing system is not that good.
I even did most my last loan application via WhatsApp. And also discovered last year that the only way to contact one bank about an ACH transfer was via WhatsApp or by visiting a branch.
So basically, it's the most used and most affordable main way to reliably reach anyone or any company. From the largest bank, to the smallest mom and pop store. From my company's founder to the newest intern.
The only thing I still get by plain SMS is multi factor authentication tokens or the ocassional spam message.
In my country, WhatsApp, Facebook and Youtube are not free, but are a lot cheaper than general data packages. Which means we must organize even harder to get rid of these non-internet-neutrality believing companies.
When we went to Italy a few years ago it was a similar situation. You didn't have to use WhatsApp but it was far easier to get a taxi. Any driver who you didn't hail via WhatsApp would suggest you message then directly via WhatsApp for future rides.
> when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
Is it common for people to reach their limits? I understand it may happen by accident when you turn off wifi then forget to re-enable, but normally one takes care of their data quota or their plans and usage is such that they never or rarely use it completely, right?
I imagine one also has the option in both prepaid and postpaid plans to get more data for the rest of the month if it ever happens that they need more. It'd just be more expensive since it's out of package.
When I had limited plans I burned through it every month and had to live at the dialup level speeds the phone companies gave you once you used up all your LTE data. Usually it was because I had to do more driving that month than normal so I'd eat up more data streaming podcasts/music. Always kept an eye on how much data I had left, but used it all anyway.
At least now I have unlimited data via a prepaid plan so I can freely tether when cable internet goes down weekly.
The reason I originally signed-up to WhatsApp was because of spending more and more time in Brazil and realising how ingrained in society it is. Even though a lot of my friends and family there have iPhones, none use iMessage.
Reason is that it is also an interface for SMS, and SMS in Brazil is obscenely crazy expensive, some operators might charge 1 BRL per message or stuff like that (for context: 1 BRL is the price of a cup of coffee or of a bottle of water), using iMessage and having it to switch to SMS without you noticing can rack bills that are easily bigger than your wages.
It's not only expensive, SMS is dangerous too! There is huge amount of fraud around SMS and the “SIM swap” technique to clone credit cards and cause all kinds of havoc, some of them with the participation of corrupted employees from telecom companies.
You're right, I must have activated that toggle years ago and forgotten about it. Yes the SMS fallback could be painful if you're not paying attention.
> Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp... it's assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A
Pretty much correct in some countries.
My family (not in Brazil, but also not in the same country as me) all have Whatsapp. So I have it to keep in contact with them. They have it because everyone there has it. It's circular, it's the "network effect" but it's true. I can't entirely switch unless they switch too, and they can't switch unless their friends and co-workers switch. etc.
> [Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.
There are several third-party tools that allow to convert the history from Android to iOS. I recently switched and was able to keep all of my history.
Mind naming the one you used? We'll have a spare iPhone soon when my wife upgrades and it might be time for me to go back to iOS after many years. I'm just a bit worried about some apps and things that might be harder to migrate like this.
> When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case.
This is a huge issue which I've had to come to grips with as well. I use both Telegram and WhatsApp (among other things) and I can't believe WhatsApp and Messenger, despite being supported by a FAANG such as FB, fall short on features - including the one you mentioned - whereas Telegram, a much smaller firm has been able to constantly provide useful features at a reasonable rate (not so fast and not so slow, so that users have time to adapt to changes).
Right now I cannot use Telegram that much because my network is all on WhatsApp and Messenger, but I do miss the good features such as being able to transfer all chats to other devices and use a desktop client without having to authorize it every single time (WhatsApp sucks at this...), literally send/receive any file format and being able to send messages to yourself - which acted as a private __cloud__. I think the fact that Telegram is moving towards ads could actually be a good signal that their main revenue is going to depend on ads, and not so much on selling users' data, but we shall see.
> I can't believe WhatsApp and Messenger, despite being supported by a FAANG such as FB, fall short on features - including the one you mentioned - whereas Telegram
Messenger has that feature too. Actually for both Messenger and Telegram it's much easier to provide it, because they don't encrypt the message, they just store them unencrypted. So they don't have anything special to do to give access to them from any device.
Sounds like a replacement for SMS is needed ASAP. We should not be relying on tech giants for something as critical as messaging. SMS is provided as part of a phone plan and does not rely on any FAANGs to operate. We need an end-to-end encrypted protocol for use over the cell network that is provided by default with all cell plans.
"When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case." - YAP!!!! TRUE!!!!
> When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case.
Same in India. It is indeed a critical social infrastructure here, if one is "texting" someone it is inherently assumed it would be through WhatsApp. And yes, schools, offices and even the Police use it too.
Actually I think the EU recently passed a law that bans not counting data use toward specific domains to allow competition. It makes much sense with your comment.
Also missing a "I'm not switching because I've never needed to use WhatsApp" option. My social circle has been on Signal for years and WhatsApp never caught on.
I wouldn't say we're using a WhatsApp alternative, I'd say we never bothered switching to a Signal alternative (which still seems like useful information to someone looking to switch away from WhatsApp).
Sorry that I seem to offended you. That certainly wasn't my intent.
I find it interesting to that people don't use WhatsApp at all. Many posts here are claiming not using WhatsApp is impossible. Grandparent's experience demonstrate that it is.
That's an unbelievably poorly colored map -- 3 subtly different shades of green, 3 subtly different shades of blue. It's almost as though a colorblind designer set out to make everyone else suffer.
This heavily depends on country of residence. While I had been living in Serbia, there was one king - Viber. I've heard of WhatsApp back then but didn't know a single person using it. In Germany it's vice versa - the king is WhatsApp, nobody heard of Viber.
It's not that surprising. If you live in the US and don't need to text people in other countries, you probably can avoid WhatsApp pretty easily, but it's pretty much the defacto option for texting non-US family and friends, and in many countries it's the predominant form of mass communication.
UK here, have never and will never use any fcbook property and didn't use Whatsapp before then. For me it's Signal, Matrix or folk can SMS me to give up their privacy without pushing me into using other services to do so.
I have a dedicated device for wechat. I recently put whatsapp on it (with a burner phone number) because my parents refuse to use anything else and would attempt to reach me via nearby people who happen to have whatsapp. I will likely remove it again rather when it forces me to "consent" to data sharing. I am extremely uncomfortable with whatsapp, much more so than wechat even.
Canada here, have used WhatsApp perhaps 5 times, all just to communicate with small teams at events. Always uninstalled it right after and honestly have never A. missed it, or B. been asked why I'm not using it.
Last I checked, my phone and my computer do not require me to use only messaging app.
WhatsApp is "critical" now only now due to its network effects, but you can transition away to something else.
Right now I have maybe a dozen friends and family members on my matrix server. I helped them set up the app, configured their communick accounts, made a few video calls to ensure it was working, etc. Current step is to help my wife to do the same with her friends. Slowly but steadily, we are moving our communication network away from WhatsApp and into Matrix.
Each one that we move makes WhatsApp less "critical" and makes us more free from monopolistic assholes. We don't need the Government to control any of that, in fact I believe that waiting for the government to do anything is not going to achieve anything.
One issue is the fractured nature of alternatives would mean limited network effects, if one group moves to Matrix, and another to Signal, and another to Telegram, that means juggling multiple alternatives depending on the groups one is part of.
While less than ideal, even in that case Matrix has an advantage: bridges. Matrix servers can be setup with bridges to allow communication with other protocols, so matrix users can reach telegram or signal contacts without switching clients.
I quit WhatsApp, Facebook et al and went with Signal. Initially it was hard converting people to a privacy oriented service, but today I have an endless list of open chats in Signal.
Jami seems like a very neat idea, but I've encountered numerous crashes and issues with it.
It was also pretty easy to get my family using Signal because it uses your existing address book. The need to send a Jami address is a huge hurdle for the non-technical.
There is a middle ground between taking your ball and going home and playing by the new rules without complaint.
Adding another app — my vote goes to Signal - and making a lot of noise on WhatsApp is one option. If I recall correctly, WhatsApp has statuses. Changing yours to “Keeping WhatsApp for business transactions only — find me on Signal for private chat” is one idea. The people on this board have the power to move their friends away from terrible software. Use it.
> The question is "To which app are you going to switch?"
And a reasonable answer is "your assumption is wrong, I don't plan to switch at all". I have no doubt that some people will switch, what I'd like to know if that movement is niche or mainstream.
Then this question is not for you. People who want to switch decided to find out which option is supported by the community more. No one is interested how many people stay on Whatsapp (I know that it's a lot).
I'm interested in how many stay on WhatsApp. If 1000, in the poll are moving to Telegram, but 10,000 are staying on WhatsApp that changes the complexion of the result considerably.
But then I'm off the opinion petitions should collect both for-and-against responses; government petitions should be required to do so.
I'm sorry, but that is a different question, and you're welcome to ask it. This type of thing is a bloody epidemic on the internet, where people will ask a question; "Do I use Atom or VS Code?" and millions of idiots will pile on saying "Just use Emacs". Aaargh! Just stick to the confines of the question! Too many discussions have gotten derailed on stack exchange, reddit, microsoft answers...nowhere is safe.
These kinds of sermonising replies would still be OK if the author first spent some time answering the question on its own merit and then talked about alternatives. Otherwise, it's preachy and irritating.
> Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
If I choose to stop using my ISP, I have no need to "go offline". I can simply switch ISPs and I still get the exact same internet. This is why we must not fall for this "critical social infrastructure" trap. No one company deserves our business. We can and should go elsewhere.
Messaging should be like the internet. If I don't like my messaging provider, I should be able to switch and still message everybody. Ideally, I would be able to bring my identifier with me. Luckily, SMS already provides this. I therefore recommend old-fashioned SMS/MMS for messaging. If you want something more "modern", I would recommend Matrix, as it is the only "modern" messaging system that wants to allow people to switch providers while still messaging the same people.
> Matrix ... the only "modern" messaging system that wants to allow people to switch providers while still messaging the same people.
But does it really do so in practice? If I'm using Element/Matrix and a colleague is using WhatsApp, or Signal, or Telegram, or Briar. Can they reliably send me messages? Can I reliably send them messages?
I've been told it's possible, but more than one person I know has tried and failed. Is it common? Reliable? Possible?
> But does it really do so in practice? If I'm using Element/Matrix and a colleague is using WhatsApp, or Signal, or Telegram, or Briar. Can they reliably send me messages? Can I reliably send them messages?
Matrix is not the provider. Matrix is the protocol/idea. Element is both an app and a service.
What is common, reliable, and achievable in practice: I decide I no longer like New Vector (who run the matrix.org home server). I switch to Purism's matrix server. I no longer am doing business with New Vector, yet I can still chat with everybody that is using New Vector's matrix service.
But you're still only talking about apps that run on top of Matrix ... your initial comment made it sound like it was possible to interact with people on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc.
I know that Matrix isn't the provider, that's why I mentioned Element/Matrix. I know that you can communicate between services that are all running on top of Matrix. That's why I specifically asked about other services. As I say, your comment seemed to imply it was possible, but most of the information I have suggests it isn't.
Matrix does have a feature called Bridges which would allow you to talk to someone on WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, etc. through your Matrix client. However, I suspect that they have some reliability issues.
Anecdote: I've been running my own Matrix bridges for WhatsApp and Signal (for my personal accounts) and they've been nothing but rock solid. Caveat being that with the pandemic I've exclusively used them at home, they're hosted on private infrastructure. It was a bit of a thing to set up, not being familiar with Matrix at all before, but now it's a docker-compose file.
To be clear, I send messages from my Matrix client to my Matrix server, software running on that server bridges it to WhatsApp/Signal as appropriate, same for incoming messages. Photos work as well.
I think WhatsApp relies on a data connection to your phone, and the bridge will disconnect whenever that drops. Having set this all up, I'm a pretty big convert to Matrix - just need to get the world on board. I'd love to have an SMS bridge as well, see how far I can go.
I haven't written anything up anywhere, but I have a rough outline of it - I can pull it together today and see if it's consumable by others. If you're at all familiar with the tools, they're deployed in their most vanilla capacities. The grief for me was the tiny amount of configuration each piece needed to fit with everything else. Components: postgres, Synapse (Matrix server), Signald (Signal client daemon), mautrix-signal (Signal-Matrix bridge), mautrix-whatsapp (WhatsApp-Matrix bridge), Element (Matrix client)
I didn't get around to actually doing something nice, but rather than leave things hanging I dumped my docker-compose file + some notes (that might be mostly useless) here: https://controlc.com/fbe73ad3. When I move it to a different machine, as this was originally just out of curiosity until it worked so well, I'll make sure to write something more usable up.
It's been ~6 weeks since I set it up and it's been working since the first time without any modifications, so I honestly forget some of what I did. The general flow is: configure the bridges (config.yaml), integrate them with Synapse (registration.yaml), add your Matrix user, then configure the bridge users.
> As I say, your comment seemed to imply it was possible,
After re-reading my comment, I can see how one would think that. I apologize for the confusion. I was actually trying to draw a distinction be between messaging systems that are provider agnostic and those that aren't. SMS and Matrix both allow multiple competing providers to interoperate. WhatsApp does not. That is why, I believe that we must not consider Whatsapp "critical infrastructure". No one company should be "critical".
> I can simply switch ISPs and I still get the exact same internet. This is why we must not fall for this "critical social infrastructure" trap. No one company deserves our business. We can and should go elsewhere.
I don't think you realize it's basically a privilege to be able to change your ISP. I have two options and have switched last month - it took three months of figuring out who should fix broken fiber (look at me, I have FTTH, another privilege).
so if you say you can 'simply switch' your ISP, you're in a lucky place.
At this point the game has changed with social apps; I’m including messaging as “social.” It is easier than ever to rebuild the important parts of your social graph on Signal, Clubhouse, Snap, IG, whatever platform you need. I talk to the same friends via Twitter DM, WhatsApp, IG, signal, hangouts and iMessage. Open access to contact books and APIs have made this so easy. I can leave WhatsApp and my network will find me elsewhere.
I don't think this is true. Sure, you can maybe get your close friends or close family to switch. But I don't think my landlord or my distant relatives will install Signal just because I don't want to use WhatsApp anymore.
SMS/MMS don't work or are unreliable for international communication. SMS/MMS, historically, have been unreliable cross-carrier domestically in the US. Many cheaper Android phones, especially, seemed to be particularly poor players with SMS/MMS group chats. SMS/MMS doesn't guarantee message delivery order (which can lead to some comical exchanges when the first split of the message shows up a day after the last split, but also obnoxious). MMS, depending on phone, isn't particularly useful for a lot of multimedia or mixed content messages (not just text or simple and small images).
WhatsApp is free on carriers in many countries (including large portions of Asia and South America), contrasting with other messaging platforms which use a standard data plan. It delivers messages reliably, group messages just work, and it works properly for mixed content messages. And data is (relatively) cheap in most countries where WhatsApp isn't free.
That doesn't apply to me or anyone I know. I know a handful on signal and telegram but the vast majority are on WhatsApp with a smaller number on messenger.
People can contact me on signal but I mostly use WhatsApp for group chats and I'm not so important that everyone will install a newaapp just to include me in a group chat.
I used to have the same thinking, lurked on Signal for a while, then suddenly all my contacts started to show up.
Even my 14 year old got all her friends on Signal (without my direct influence) because they are very aware of instagram/FB addiction and want to stay away from it.
Signal now supports group chats as well, thought it looks like all participants have to be using Signal otherwise it uses regular MMS and the "group" dynamic breaks down.
I know that it supports group chats, but the whole group would have to switch to it. That might happen with one such group in the next few days as we've had a long discussion. 1 member of the 15 in the group has now installed signal. 2 of us were already on signal.
That still leaves 12 more to switch but it could happen.
I feel ya, deleting whatsapp will not be great for my social life. Neither was deleting facebook, at least at the time when it was still being used. Whatsapp has inserted itself into the social fabric as a benevolent offering and now that we are all locked in we get what we payed for.
But that is all the more reason to get rid of it. Of course this makes life complicated. But if we don't make these hard choices and 'sacrifices', it will never stop. They will keep eroding away at our privacy and freedom. It will only become harder the longer we wait.
This kind of things will keep happening though as long as we allow monopolies and closed platforms. We should really be more careful with accepting these companies into our lives.
As someone who's never used such a service, help me understand what's so critical about it. Can't people just send SMS? Aren't people on fb anyway, which can be accessed with a container on Firefox?
EDIT: got some answers re SMS. Fine, though that doesn't explain why there is so much overlap/redundancy with social media applications. At a glance, it appears I could do the very same things (groups, multimedia) messaging people on facebook without having to install an app, and if people are on whatsapp they're almost 100% on facebook.
Apparently the "critical" nature of this is the facility of sending high rates of pictures and videos to others. I suspect mere FOMO owing to group-chat being localized there is enough to keep some people from cutting the cord, not the ability to communicate to multiple people in itself. People really are addicted to each other.
WhatsApp allows Group Conversations and Sharing Media (Pictures, Videos, Files, Audio Files, GPS Location, Video Calls). SMS and MMS can not cope with that in large quantity like 100mbs of video files and hundred of pictures, because data is cheaper than MMS costs.
This Privacy policy change whill allow Facebook, who bought WhatsApp, to extract all these data for their own purpose, before it was not the case.
Can't use SMS/MMS with people internationally who do not have an international mobile plan. If they also do not have a <insert other mutual account> then WhatsApp is the next option short of email.
Concerning sms in many of the countries worldwide sms is not free/unlimited as the case in the us you only get a specific amount in your plan with extremely late/unreliable delivery so it's basically unusable for chat where I'm from and only works in the case of ads and credit card transaction notifications.
whatsapp also had the advantage of being simple to use requiring only your phone number and it worked on pretty much any phone you had from symbian feature phones to the latest iphone helping it to gain widespread traction among people.
Sharing WhatsApp numbers is quick an can be done with everyone. It doesn't require your real name and doesn't share your list of friends by default.
It means I can freely share my WhatsApp number with my bank, my boss, the delivery person, the plumber, the clerk from the nearby cafeteria, clients, the driver of the tow truck, or my teachers, anyone.
But there is no way I'll share my Facebook or Intagram name/id with themn. That's more private and usually only done for friends or acquaintances.
Unfortunately, people in Brazil don't want to use SMS anymore. They replaced it by WhatsApp because well, they can show their happy life in Stories, see if someone is online, if they saw the message or are answering it... Really bad
I agree, all my friends and familly are on WhatsApp and they will definitely not switch. So from my point of view, I have to balance the cost between sharing data to Facebook and severely hampering communications with my love ones.
I guess what I'm saying is that the network effect is just too damn strong (for me at least).
"Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with yout ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company."
Hopefully the reason this is at the top is not this sentence.
This hallucinatory idea is exactly what Facebook PR, a.k.a. "damage control", wants people to believe.
You have no contract with Facebook. You pay them nothing. There is no legal recourse whatsoever. You cannot enforce "your end of the bargain" because Facebook undertakes no obligations to you.
Say what you want about the quality of your internet or cellular provider's service, etc., or how much you hate a company, but the fact is they have to fulfill their contractual obligations and provide service, they cannot just do whatever they want, whenever they want, as Facebook can.
If the internet/cellular provider does not deliver, then there is no Facebook. Whereas Facebook could disappear if their advertisers stop paying and the internet would still be here, because people would still be paying for internet access, and internet users would still use the internet to do all the same things they do now, and more.
Practically speaking, you may treat a tech company like a common carrier, like a telephone/internet/cellular provider. After all to the user it may seem no different. It is accessed through a "phone" and it seems to work like the service they pay for through an ISP or cellular provider.
But the minute you say this is like a "contract" you are submitting to pure delusion. You have no contract with Facebook as a user and you pay nothing. You're a product not a customer. Facebook has essentially zero exposure to liability from user complaints and that is why you are reading so many complaints about them, e.g., on HN. The best a user can do is rant into the aether and pound sand. There is no contract to enforce!
Then there is the absurdity of pretending that access to one company's computers is equivalent to access to the entire internet. This is like saying cancelling your subscription to AOL is like cancelling your account with your ISP. Today, no one is naive enough to equate AOL with the internet, as people once did. But Facebook believes people are naive enough to equate "Facebook" with "the internet". No doubt the AOL phenomena is a running joke at Facebook. The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
Do whatever you want, but let's refrain from propagating illusions that tech companies want people to believe.
Given how integrated Whatsapp is in many non-US markets, their statement is spot on. It has nothing to do with propagating the lies of a tech company. It's about being stuck in a society that has moved to a single platform because it made itself available as the easiest method long before facebook bought it up.
See Also: Weechat in china, LINE in Japan.
Living in the US I considering myself lucky that I'm not locked into a singular platform for communcation, payments, services, etc like many others.
That’s not a good comparison. There are many alternatives to WhatsApp and it’s not a „critical“ infrastructure. In contrast, you sometimes can’t choose your ISP and internet is much more critical.
It can be in area's (such as in The Netherlands) where literally _everyone_ is on WhatsApp and it is the default form of personal online communication.
Not using WhatsApp means not being able to communicate with a lot of people.
Same in the UK. All my friends, family, coworkers. My boss. I've used WhatsApp instead of email to communicate with my landlord, recruiters. Some companies even use it for customer service as an alternative to phone or some terrible chat built into their website.
In the Netherlands it's so pervasive, it isn't only the default form a personal online communication anymore. Rather, it is quickly becoming the default form of online customer interaction as well.
I use both. I realize that Facebook already has my social graph and the epsilon more information they get from my family chats pencils out to epsilon. I use Signal when I don't want Facebook to know and monetize that knowledge.
That might depend on where you live. Around here, WhatsApp definitely is "critical", in the sense that schools, sports clubs, business as well as social life seem to be built around it nowadays. :-(
Where I live, everything is based around WhatsApp. If you want to receive a package from Amazon/FedEx/DHL/UPS, etc. The shipment will only be delivered to the location you share with the courier on WhatsApp, if you're not on WhatsApp you can't even receive packages. There are so many other things like this that are happening only on WhatsApp, and if you're not on it you won't even be able to use basic services.
I can choose my ISP in the UK, but we have such brutally entrenched network effects with WhatsApp that it literally means not talking to loved ones and community groups if you quit.
Plus I'm sure they've linked all the data they can in their backend already. It's hard to believe the notice we all got this morning was really going to realistically change very much of anything.
I ask this as a non-Whatsapp user. I have read the comments and I understand in some countries (Brazil, Netherlands, etc.) that Whatsapp is the main tool for person to person and person to business communications. What I can't figure out is why did it displace "plain SMS" or other tools. What drove the adoption? I'd love to hear more about that - was Whatsapp just the first mover?
> What I can't figure out is why did it displace "plain SMS" or other tools.
SMS was unreliable, at least back when it was used. It was common for someone to receive it hours later or at least many minutes later, when it was too late. Informing someone you just got the message they told you about in-person a while back was a common occurrence. You also don't know when a person received your message, so you would opt to call them anyways if they take too long to reply with something even if they were just busy. Basically, the 2 checkmarks on each message is the killer feature.
Spam is also a problem with SMS.
Email is something that never really took off in mobile devices. I suppose everyone saw it as the same thing as SMS, with the same issues. Perhaps worse, since an email client needed to poll the server for new messages. SMS is something people did since before smartphones. Dumbphones didn't commonly have real support for email. Also, email on a mobile device meant you had to setup the mail client, and you didn't have to setup anything with SMS, just give people your number.
SMS: Pricy, no audio messages and no pictures/videos (also no documents).
Whatsapp: free (besides internet usage - but some providers offered unlimited/extended whatsapp data), audio messages, send photos/videos/audios (not from audio message)/documents, can do video and audio calls from the same screen, without moving away from the app
There's just no competitor with same parity of features (with the same quality) and easiness to use.
Telegram has calls, but they just don't work for me: either my parents can't hear me properly, or there's a HUGE delay in the audio call, I keep hearing the reconnection beeps...
I'm just off an audio call to my parents on Telegram, had to drop off and use whatsapp because it was unusable
I remember when my dad told me his cousin from Venezuela suggested an app to him that allowed him to make free calls to anyone who also has it. I told him that was probably not right and he might have downloaded malware on his Android... Turns out he was right and the app took Brazil by storm
On top of that, media, voice clips and cross-platform compatibility.
Yeah, some countries don't charge premiums for long-distance and roaming between each other, but among those that do charge such premiums, this would be another killer feature.
Price! While my current phone plan includes "unlimited text messaging" ... this wasn't always the case. And even today, if I am roaming out of region, I get charged anywhere between 10 - 45 cents per text message. All here in Canada!
I guess the question is does switching piecemeal allow for some of the benefits of switching wholesale? Especially, can I restrict which parts of my address book (and other data) get shared with WhatsApp?
Then I could communicate with people who are on another platform using that platform but keep using WhatsApp for people who haven't moved over. Hopefully over time there would be a complete migration.
Not really. These things go slow at first and then all of a sudden. I think Facebook have underestimated the resilience of their network effect to an ultimatum like this. Integrity is a force multiplier, and when you set your integrity to zero it doesn't take long before the rest of your asset is also zero. Anything times zero is zero. Even WhatsApp. How the mighty fall.
I understand the social lock-in factor, but there's no technological reason why people couldn't migrate to another app.
Messaging apps, for 99% of the people, are only supposed to deliver text and media from A to B. It's not hard in 2021 to develop such an app, even with E2E encryption and 2FA, even for a CS graduate. I'm appalled by the scarcity of real alternatives to WhatsApp, considering that a messaging app is a piece of software with low technological barriers.
The solution seems quite clear to me. Force messaging apps to expose a public API, so that messages can easily be delivered regardless of the client used on both ends - XMPP used to provide exactly that, but both Google and Facebook decided to use it as a starting point and then gradually deviate from it with their own closed implementations.
If one platform decides to bully its users with "let me read your messages so I can send you better ads or leave the platform", users would simply leave that platform without losing their contacts.
This is much more important than personal preference. This is detrimental to the flow of information in entire countries, no kidding. Each person can contribute to end this – or not.
That's what you should bdo. If you don't like the company don't buy from them.
Especially when many alternatives exist.
It's just a choice to use WhatsApp not a necessity.
Just remember MySpace.
What use is switching to some messenger that no one you know uses?
Obviously you can always fall back on SMS and e-mail, probably, but that is a path to social isolation in many cases.
So, it’s not exactly the same as having two ISPs to pick from but to pretend that your choice is completely free and unconstrained is also a dangerous lie to tell yourself and others.
To solve this … well, I don’t know. Probably regulation? Benevolent tech giants that for some reason decide to push open, federated messengers?
The mental overhead of switching between - and keeping track of - messaging apps shouldn't be ignored.
Speaking from experience, I have a hard time remembering which specific platform is preferred by specific contacts. It's a minor annoyance, but it's always present.
How many messenger apps do you run, and how many is too many?
For me, the limit is 2. Note that currently I am forced to keep 5 different apps to keep in touch with my contacts.
It's more like canceling your contract with your ISP, but you don't live in the US and you have options wrt to ISP and you have plenty others to choose from :)
I mean, if that's your argument then it seems like the OP article isn't valuable news. It's a change to terms of service when you never trusted the ToS to begin with.
[UK] All the school chat for my kids, both for secondary schoolers and for us as parents, is on WhatsApp. Amongst my family WhatsApp is the primary means of group communication.
I live in the UK and this is absolutely 100% not true, you cannot function in society here without WhatsApp. In Australia the same is true for Facebook. In every country there's something, and almost all of them outside China are owned by Facebook.
"Cannot function in society" is something of an exaggeration. I have never used WhatsApp and never really suffered for it. The only issue I noticed is needing to check in with individual members of the board game group and rock climbing group every now and then to see if there are plans.
I find this incredible to hear. I know many people who live very sociable lives who don’t have WhatsApp or Facebook. And these are not techno privacy geeks but regular people across different age groups.
I have to strongly disagree based on personal evidence that ‘you cannot function socially in society without WhatsApp’.
"It is just one out of literally dozens of available text messaging apps"
It baffles me people are still saying this.
You can only message people that are using the SAME messaging app as you. I can't just up and switch apps and expect my 30+ friends and relatives and housemates and coworkers to switch with me!
> You can only message people that are using the SAME messaging app as you.
No, Matrix supports bridging with about two dozen protocols,¹ many of which support multiple clients (at least 7: IRC, RSS, Email, SMS, Mastodon, libpurple —actually a library supporting multiple protocols including IRC and XMPP— and Twitter) — some of which have dozens if not hundreds of clients.
¹IRC, Slack, RSS, Gitter, Discord, RocketChat, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Email, SMS, Mastodon, libpurple, GroupMe, Skype, WeChat, Tox, Mumble, Twitter, Mattermost, Keybase (Edit: this one was discontinued), Google Hangouts, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Signal — https://matrix.org/bridges/
Not if you are content to send SMS/MMS messages. I text all of my friends, clients, and family networks and avoid propritary platforms and none of them have ever complained.
> Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure."
... is it ? I only got whatsapp last year and most of the people I know from real life aren't on it. In a big french city with a 50 thousand-students university.
Obviously this depends on your exact circumstances. You might be whole unaffected or literally everyone you know might use it. Either way, you depend on other people.
This sucks, by the way. No doubt about that. But I doubt that individuals can do anything in that regard.
Probably regulation. Or a benevolent tech company that decides to push some sort of open messenger protocol (with good enough properties) that anyone can join and where anyone can make clients for. You know, kinda like e-mail.
For some people it is yes. It varies by region though. Since not everyone is in a big French city with a fifty-thousand-student university, different messaging applications are popular in different areas.
Back in the day, all the people in the US I knew used AOL Instant Messenger, but if I wanted to talk to anyone in the UK I had to use MSN Messenger. A more modern example: If you have family in China, you have to use WeChat.
>Excluding company ownership, what is the crucial difference between all IM listed?
The crucial difference is that in my life everyone is on WhatsApp, and no one is on any of the other IMs. That is the difference.
And I don't use the word everyone here lightly, I mean it (99,9%) literally. My family, my parents, my friends, my colleagues, my 91 year old grandmother, my potential clients, my actual clients, the support line for the webshop I order from, the support line for my supermarket, etc... Everyone.
I can't speak for other countries, but in the Netherlands WhatsApp is undeniably a part of your social infrastructure.
It doesn't matter if any of those other IMs have feature parity, better security or stricter privacy. There's just no one to message.
- Practically every school (elementary school) in Germany uses WhatsApp for communication among Parents and Teachers. If you don't have WhatsApp, you have go to the school and read the official announcements in the wall. Lot of important information there, for example Teacher short-notice absence, protocol from meetings, etc.
- The favorite communication channel of my university is via Whatsapp. There are lot of tools to consolidate and do the customer relationship via WhatsApp.
- Back in the normal days, every single airbnb host that i contacted, were using WhatsApp
So to make it clearer, the main difference between all IM listed are:
- the user base itself (two billion users for WhatsApp[1])
- The number of 3rd part tools offering integration with that tools (zendesk, salesforce, etc).
Yep exactly, "critical social infrastructure" is on point. Here almost everyone is on WhatsApp and some are on messenger, meanwhile the other apps are only used by a few.
Last year I even had to register on FB to not be out of the loop concerning a sport club I got in.
I've seem this kind of reaction coming from my friends and colleagues here in US, because they are still using SMS (or Apple's Messages when they have an iPhone) for messaging. And there is rarely a thing like "I'll text that store to place an order for delivery" or many of the other uses WhatsApp get in other countries.
I wouldn't say this is on purpose but they are unaware of how WhatsApp is used everywhere else.
"WhatsApp is owned by fucking Facebook. Let that sear in your mind"
You might have good arguments for your white-hot searing hatred of this company, but I will confess, it makes your position look much worse when you represent it with hotly charged emotional statements instead of reasoning.
For example: I find it trivial to understand why someone would call a Facebook service "Critical Infrastructure", thinking about how we don't control how families and communities choose to meet up.
Your childs little league sport uses facebook, your aunt and uncles have organized the family into a whatsapp channel, your President incites riots on Twitter... we don't get to choose which networks are the critical ones, and sometimes, we make the binary choice of "Be apart of society" or "Don't".
Just my 2c, it doesn't seem that hard to understand why he would call these things critical, when you actually take a few moments to think it through honestly.
> they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure."
Really? That seems a depressingly low bar for what you consider "critical". If WhatsApp would disappear tomorrow, I think my social infrastructure would not suffer at all. I still have a smartphone with hundreds of other apps, including iMessage, SMS, and so on..
Besides that, I only consider real human interaction as critical.
> Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
Sounds kind of depressing again. Not sure where you live, but most countries in the world have more than one ISP. I have switched ISP often in my lifetime. Never was it an issue, nor a massive burden and it has not caused me to go offline at all.
> Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure."
No such thing as "critical social infrastructure." Could you live without whatsapp? Yes. Then by definition it is not critical.
> Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
Not at all. Some areas in the US don't have choice of what ISP they can use, but you have many good choices for messaging apps.
I am growing tiresome of people complaining (on HN, of all places) about how evil facebook and google are but will not go as far as cancelling facebook or using duckduckgo for search, or protonmail for email.
Folks, if you are not happy, you have choices and they are free and very convenient. The services you complain about using for free are not the problem, you're just lazy.
EDIT - you folks in the replies are basically proving my point. Instead of taking ownership over the freedom of choice that you have, you would rather make excuses to justify lack of initiative. That's not a healthy or happy frame of mind to box yourself in, and it gives too much of your emotional influence to the platforms. Like you folks are seriously comparing a messaging app to ISPs and heating in london...really? Give me a break, snowflake.
Your analogies are very poor and all over the place. Can you live without electricity? Sure, if you are willing to severely decrease your quality of life.
Your ISP analogy is again flawed while the OPs' is reasonably relevant. A social communication app has a critical part to being relevant to use - the social part. It's a chicken and egg problem because if people don't use Signal or Telegram or wall, the app serves no useful purpose. The mere existence of a choice does not mean that all choices are equally useful or even relevant.
This argument of "you're lazy" is (ironically) incredibly lazy and often results in software that is unreasonably hard to use - again, an analogy that i hope folks here would understand. Whatsapp works, is simple to use and has sufficient users to be critical infrastructure. Using "laziness" is a cop out. If something isn't broken, don't fix it.
> Could you live without whatsapp? Yes. Then by definition it is not critical.
Can I live without heating in London? Yes I wouldn't die without it. But without heating it's extremely uncomfortable. I'd say it is critical for me because "dying/not dying" is not the criteria for deciding.
Have you travelled or lived in central or South America? WhatsApp is critical social infrastructure. WhatsApp is used more than telephones. For everything. Businesses advertise their WhatsApp contact before, or even omitting, a telephone number. People you meet want your WhatsApp for communication, not your telephone number. WhatsApp has become critical to these countries as the primary form of communication.
Telegram is a great IM experience. The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger.
The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care about such things, I think Signal wins hands down. And the UX is fine, just not quite as good as Telegram in my view.
(A third option not in your poll that might be worth evaluating is Wickr. I haven't used it personally, but I've seen it come up in these sorts of discussions.)
As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default, so while WhatsApp might see your contacts, Telegram can see most of your messages.
> As a reminder encrypted messages aren't easily searchable
That's false. Encrypted messages aren't searchable by third-parties. End-to-end encrypted messages are searchable by only the communicating parties regardless of where they're stored.
There's also the issue of mirroring by third-parties, but then we're talking about data in transit versus at rest, your backup methods, and so forth. (And I don't have time to get into that this morning.)
Building and maintaining a super fast searching index on a phone is not an easy task or even doable.
Telegram is used a lot in developing countries which are using phones made 3-7 years ago. Or phones that are made recently but with old chips and tech. Maintaining a search index across literally millions or billions (some groups are really really big) messages isn't something your phone can reasonably do.
I do wish telegram was e2ee for IMs, but for groups and super groups and channels I don't particularly care.
Assuming a message is 200 bytes or so, searching millions of messages is trivially doable on your phone (200 MB full text index). Billions is pushing it a bit, but you can work around on the app level (e.g. only index the last month in high traffic groups).
How are you indexing literally billions of messages on tiny mobile devices? What happens when you wipe your device and you want to have your chat history from before? How do you download all the previous chat messages? Who hosts the chat index?
I think it is very unlikely for a conversation to reach billions of messages. There are less than 32 million seconds in a year. So, Yoigo would need to send a message per seconds for decades to reach a billion.
Of course there are people who are much more popular than me, so it might be possible and I am not aware of it. :)
There is no limit to joining these chats. These design decisions Telegram has picked has allowed the app to be quasi social media, rather than just IM. You can't index these and maintain chat history locally. You'd need way more bandwidth and energy and computational power than the average cellphone has.
All Signal clients have a search feature. Its about as easy to use as any other search tool. You can have end to end encryption on messaging and still have a client-side search feature.
> Many Telegram users are away of it's quirks and how it operates differently to other IMs
That's probably true, but a significant proportion of users are not, and do not realize that their chats are not encrypted. It's no surprise either, given that security is one of the core things that Telegram markets itself on -- unfairly so, in my opinion.
Not really. Whatsapp is used by every person in Brazil, yet didn't get around a temporary ban [1]. Telegram gained about
1.5 Million people switching to telegram in a day. [2]
Whatsapp didn't win many users, even when Telegram was banned in Russia for months.
Telegram even worked in Belarus despite the whole internet shutting down there. [3]
But they are easily searchable for the vast majority of scenarios. I've got years worth of message history on my $300 phone, and yet it has no problems returning search results nearly instantly.
I don’t think so. It doesn’t use the double ratchet algorithm used in DMs but still the participants of the group formulate a secret key for the group and share this key with every participant using the more secure protocol. The key cannot be read by the server as it is shared using conventional E2EE.
It is proprietary, so there is no proof they didn't tamper with the code to appear to be working on clients. And chances are against the fragile link in the chain - the user.
Which discusses how Telegram was banned in many countries for refusing cooperation while WhatsApp suspiciously was never banned, which could mean that WhatsApp gives governments everything they demand.
I suspect the Google/Facebook deal for "free backup of WhatsApp chats on your Google account" is exactly that.
WhatsApp had perfectly usable encrypted backup - which took up space on your Google backup. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't encrypted and didn't take up space. But you don't have access to it yourself - only Google does (and WhatsApp if it is recovering). This is a perfect way to provide all the data to various governments for 99.9% of users, without killing the E2E encryption.
They didn't backdoor it. It was back in 2013 when they were new. Everyone was going "whoa, your encryption is weird" and they were defending themselves by saying "we have 6 world champion programmers".
Anyways, something like 6 months after launch a Russian guy found that they were seeding their secret chat keys with entropy from the server, meaning the server could trivially MITM any secret chat. Pretty embarrassing.
Iirc it got quite little publicity since most of the discussion was in Russian, and the disclosure was in a forum post in an obscure forum.
That was the month telegram launched? It's been 7 years. It was a new app. The same bug is still being used against it?
Do you have any recent bugs? Or 'backdoors'? All their official apps are open source and reproducible. Must be easy to find bugs for security researchers. They even offer much larger bounties compared to other apps.
Anything? I want to believe people saying bad crypto, but it looks like there's no actual proof.
Here's something that says it is good, published more recently.
It’s really obvious this wasn’t a bug, but a backdoor. It proves that Telegram is an actively hostile adversary, the fact that their encryption scheme hasn’t been publicly broken since then doesn’t change that.
> Or 'backdoors'?
You might argue that their deliberate decision to not encrypt most chats is exactly that, more of a front door really.
This is false. No proposed ads in 1:1 or any size group chats, only large channels (which are like RSS feeds, you can join but not post).
In addition 100% of Telegram traffic is encrypted over the wire (like this website, your bank, etc). The only difference with secret chats is that they're end to end encrypted.
Signal is a very bad user experience if you use several devices (phone, tablet, home computer, work computer). Continuing a chat on a different device doesn't work nearly as well as on Telegram where it's flawless.
Not true at all - you have no ads looking at your screen, neither chatting privately. Group/channel owners may choose to add ads, but you can always run your own client made to ignore them - telegram is open source.
Not showing you ads in 1:1 chat or in groups the maintainer has chose not to enable them in is different from, "I have your data ready to go for targeted advertisement".
This is essentially the Google model. Your search queries and browsing history (and Android and Chrome) are essential to targeted ads shown on every website "the webmasters choose to enable them on".
What? Google uses all your info for creepy personalized ads. Telegram is showing the same ads to everyone in a channel. And it isn't in 1:1 chats cuz they're supposed to be non-intrusive and gives a feeling of privacy.
Who is the 'maintainer'? Telegram is the only entity here.
The data is still on Telegram's servers, unencrypted. They may be doing ads in a channel/group, but I don't think for one second that's where they're going to stop now that they've entered that rabbit hole. By the time you'd realise, it'd be too late, since they've got your data on their servers, unencrypted. This is strictly worse than WhatsApp.
I'd say forcing me to type on a shitty tiny on-screen keyboard (or use a _browser_ while still keeping the network on my phone running) is such a terrible experience that literally everything else wins in comparison to this.
> ...literally everything else wins in comparison to this.
I think you do realise that WhatsApp not only uses E2E but pins identity to a phone number; and so, there's no way to do desktop-client any more securely unless the messages always go through the phone and/or the phone is also connected to the WhatsApp servers.
I believe you have already made a choice to use insecure services because "convenience", but in the context of current discussion (privacy and security), WhatsApp comes out superior despite Facebook's involvement. And that's saying something.
> As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default
This isn't just misleading but actually plain wrong.
Unless you want to tell my your internet banking is unencrypted too ;-)
Edit: as seen downthread there a number of ways to make this more or less correct, but as it stand, and particularly with the "at all" at the end of one of the claims it is just plain wrong.
> Telegram can see most of your messages.
This part is technically correct however. Telegram says they taken steps to prevent rouge admins from seing it and to prevent themselves from being able to produce copies for governments, however there's no way for us to know if it was true then, if it is true now, if it is true in the future or at any point in between so worthless if you don't trust them.
If this is a problem for you generally I recommend stop using email, stop sending letters etc and rely only on Signal or Matrix.
For many of us however this is acceptable: we send letters or even post cards fully unencrypted fully aware that they might be read.
We send mails fully aware that it can be read at any server from we send it to the one the recipient download it from.
But for some reason the same level of security is deeply problematic when Telegram is mentioned.
Although they're client/server encrypted, I think contextually it was obvious that the person was talking about end-to-end encryption. "Encrypted chat" means end-to-end encrypted, if it's used to mean client/server encrypted then that's misleading.
Encryped chat might mean E2E-encrypted yes, but even then why not add those four extra letters "E2E-" and make it obvious?
Besides, here is what I replied to:
> As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all[...]
(emphasis mine)
This is very possible to misunderstand for someone who isn't aware and the result might easily be that they stay in their abusive relationship with WhatsApp because of such FUD.
As can probably be seen from my comment history I'm no stranger to criticizing Telegram but we should stick to the facts.
Because unlike with Facebook no one has been able to show a single example of Telegram abusing their customers even once.
Let me use an example:
Would you want to ride the absolutely bulletproof and soundproof taxi that has one disadvantage: that it is well known that the drivers make notes about who you are and who you visit and sell that data to companies like Cambridge Analytica?
Or would you take another more ordinary taxi that might not be armoured and soundproof and might or might not log your visits - but at least no one has caught them red handed?
The answer depends on who you are I guess: [edit: if your main fear is that someone might be listening to your conversations and you don't care if the known shady taxi company logs who you visit, go with armoured, bulletproof taxi. I admit] there are times when E2E is a massive difference but for me this is mostly about preventing future Cambridge Analytica situations.
Because Telegram doesn't gobble up all your metadata to sell to advertisers & malcontents. Who you talk to at what moment and from what location is equally as valuable as the content of your messages.
if with Telegram "the privacy, security, and governance story is not great though", why would you migrate from WhatsApp to Telegram in first place? I personally have all 3 (Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram) and use all three with different groups and scenarios.
For example:
- With my mom and grandmom: WhatsApp
- Group of friends from jiu-jitsu: WhatsApp
- Work Colleagues and friends working with Network Security: Signal
- Notifications from services that I run like weather station, waves forecast, how full my gym is right now, some other batch services that I have: Telegram
There is no reason to be radical here. We have options, and that's great!
> if with Telegram "the privacy, security, and governance story is not great though", why would you migrate from WhatsApp to Telegram in first place?
A lot of people use WhatsApp for a lot of reasons. If security was foremost on your mind, you'd probably have already migrated away from it. On the other handd, plenty of people are using WhatsApp right now to talk to their grandmothers, and switching to Telegram is not an obviously bad choice. :)
OP listed some apps like Discord that suggest he's not laser focused on privacy and security, and perhaps is mostly just wanting to to steer clear of large corporations in general and Facebook in particular. Telegram checks those boxes.
It's about time someone made a unified messenger client that combines all these conversations and hides the detail of which service you are using to talk to friends.
I agree with you. However it won't solve the problem of privacy regarding Facebook. Other issue that I see here, people want an unified messenger, with a great user experience, 100% secure, open-source, multi-platform, free (as in beer) and no monetization included. I'm sometimes shocked that here - hacker news - people underestimate the price of good software development, infrastructure and maintenance.
Even a tiny amount of monetization should pay for development of a chat app...
Imagine you build it with a team of 5 software devs for each of linux, mac, windows, android, ios, web. You build it in Europe paying a generous salary of $80k. You need 1 server per million users (as whatsapp did pre-acquisition), hosted on say AWS. If you get 10% of the world to use it, the total running costs are 1.2 cents per user per year.
That can totally be paid for by sending each user 1 sponsored chat message per decade. That's a pretty acceptable level of advertising I'd say.
It's incompatible with VC's demanding hockey-stick revenue growth though...
> Imagine you build it with a team of 5 software devs for each of linux, mac, windows, android, ios, web. You build it in Europe paying a generous salary of $80k.
Optimistic and dangerous. You will need at least a visionary person like Moxy willing to dedicate his/her life to the project. You need a master mind to get all the security architecture right. BTW You will need an operation team and multiple servers to make sure that everything runs stable. Just look the costs for running COVID-19 apps. Development and operation. Million of Euros. You can expect similar costs to run a service able to compete with WhatsApp.
You forgot about the support staff. For example, Telegram blocks from a few hundred to a few thousand terrorist propaganda channels each day. I think that's just the tip of the iceberg.
There used to be on Android, it's called Disa, but a lot of services actively combat third party clients.
It was nice when I used it back in like 2014 because if WhatsApp went down I could just keep talking to the same person via Telegram (assuming they had both) and it'd all be in 1 joined conversation.
Is there a reason why there isn't a client that can work with matrix/signal/telegram/any service with open source clients available? Are there any existing OSS projects which have made any progress in this domain?
People are right, it doesn't solve the issue with Whatsapp, but it would mitigate some of the barrier caused by the network effect.
I'm also sceptical of walled gardens, something usable in this domain would make this less of a problem when some drama rises over Telesignix, switching clients is a lot less of an ask than switching everything.
Platform providers like Google and Apple could tear down app walled gardens by simply saying "If your app has a significant chat component, it must make available this API to allow other apps to integrate with it".
Suddenly multi-billion dollar chat apps with big network effects are mere service providers... And since Google has failed so many times at producing a popular chat app, I'm surprised they haven't gone down this route...
They wont allow it. Then they would have to pay the cost for server infra while not being able to push ads via the client. The problem is how to get money to pay employees and make profit. If you want an open messeging app/protocol it would have to be mostly peer to peer to save on server cost, and developed by voulantenteers, and servers hosted by the community.
well, now we are in full lockdown in Germany, and all gyms are closed. But until November, they were able to operate with a limited number of people training at the same time.
To make it visible to the members, My gym had a progress bar, being update as soon anybody entered or left the gym.
This information was available in their website. So I was scrapping this data and getting alerted (via telegram bot[1]) when the gym was operating under 50% the capacity and therefore avoiding wasting my time.
It does have a backup functionality, which unlike WhatsApp's doesn't store your messages unencrypted. It also doesn't force you to use a specific storage provider. If you want to have it synced, you can point your favorite sync client at it.
Additionally, they've introduced an optional PIN which you can use to recover profile, contacts and settings when switching devices - without the need to setup sync yourself.
Your only option is to export the database from the desktop app and use third party tools like https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools to decrypt the backup. However in my experience this backup does not include all of your messages and as such there is no way to get your chat history out of this walled garden.
Signal has had backup on Android for a long time. On iOS you can transfer from an old iPhone to a new one now. You scan an QR code on your old iPhone with your new iPhone to exchange a secret for transferring your messages to your new phone. I don't think you can do Andriod<->iOS. You can have sync between desktop, phone, and iPad. However you can not have messaged synced to two phones or an Android tablet yet.
Relating Telegram, it is worth to read one of the latest Durov post [0] about the possible future of the Telegram becoming used as a construct of a social platform.
Yes telegram is more usable IMO, but worse security.
In the past I might have said to people try telegram or signal, but now with the momentum of this whatsapp policy change I am pushing signal so I don't dilute the efforts.
Telegram still doesn't support message reactions. I agree with all the rest and I like to use it for some less important chats taking into account the lack of the encryption but the reactions feature seems to be really lacking and no replacement comes close - replying with stickers seems counterproductive - reactions allow less messages, not more.
The governance until now might have been very different, but Telegram is to VK what Whatsapp is to Facebook. In a way, you could say that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, but I'd still recommend Matrix as a seemingly more future-proof alternative.
The only link between Telegram and VK is that they have the same founder. Durov has been fired from VK and built Telegram after that. There is no other relation between Telegram and VK.
Not really comparable to WhatsApp and Facebook controlled by the same Zuck.
From the listed alternatives, only Matrix is the one that actually solves the issue of not having to trust our communications to any single monopolistic entity.
You could add XMPP there as well, but it really doesn't matter. What does matter is for us to start pushing for openness and start evangelizing/helping others to adopt anything that puts us back in control of our communication.
This is the one thing to fix, and the one opportunity that we are getting now to do this right.
- Element's client is not "nice": we can fix it. We can not fix closedness.
- Not everyone is using it: we can fix it. We can not fix privacy abuse from Facebook.
- It's work to run/manage a server: find a hosting provider (coughhttps://communick.comcough).
We can, but part of the selling point of Matrix is choice and I've found that not only is Element not "nice", but it actually has different goals as a client (it seems more Slack-esque in focus, than WhatsApp-esque to me).
What we need if the aim is to advocate for an alternative to WhatsApp is to find something that solves the same problems. There's a few options on Matrix.org[0]: Nio[1] seems very nice but it's iOS only and still alpha, but I've been using FluffyChat[2] and I've found it good sofar. Much much nicer than Element at least.
> It's work to run/manage a server: find a hosting provider
I'm thinking it might be time to accept that 'we', hackers/nerds/technically inclined individuals/early adopters, start 'selling' and providing these services for our families and friends.
Assuming you are involved with communick: I like the idea of, but I am not sold on moving my communications etc to some random llc. Especially with as little information as there is on the website, I'm having trouble trusting that. I would not send my friend and family there tbh.
Yes, I am involved with Communick. I wrote a Show HN a few months ago but unfortunately it didn't pick up. [0]
Regarding trust. You don't have to trust me. That is one of the best things regarding end-to-end encryption. To be completely honest, the main issues now is (1) bus factor (I am mostly working alone on it, but I do have people that can take over this in case something happens to me) and (2) I am bootstrapped and not working full-time yet. Alas, both of these issues are the type that resolve themselves by having paying customers.
This "we" is nonexistent. It will never reach mainstream usage with its current bad UI/UX, and people have not fixed it. I don't think it will ever reach feature parity.
Really? It just happened to spring into existence? No people working on it? No alternative clients?
> It will never reach mainstream usage.
Quit the defeatist BS, please. Linux is never going to be a mainstream desktop OS, yet many people have been using for decades already and are free from proprietary systems. No "feature parity"? Give it time and understand that freedom comes at a price. Do not sell yourself for convenience.
Matrix, or at least Element, has terrible UX, though, and I'd never recommend it to my family. It opens three message boxes every single time I open the web client, and I can't disable these boxes permanently. Oh, and I have to login again every time because it doesn't remember logins.
Again: bugs can be fixed. You are free to go open an issue and get developers to look at this. Element's short history has shown that they are aware of the issues and are reasonably responsive in fixing them.
There is no place you can go to open an issue that says "Facebook is exploiting user data even on applications that are supposed (promised, even) to be private.". Even if it were, ALL of Facebook's history is filled with privacy violations.
"Move fast and break things" should NEVER be a motto of a company that deals with the lives and social interactions of 2+ billion people.
Facebook’s mantra of “Move Fast and Break Things” had a clear meaning: it is far more important to ship products and innovate — at the risk of introducing bugs — than it is to keep the current version of the software in perfect working order. Especially so when you win only by our growing your competitors.
“Bugs are tolerated as they are the price worth paying for a rapidly evolving code base, but you gotta fix ‘em” wouldn’t fit so neatly on a poster.
Ironic in a thread beseeching forgiveness for Element’s incompleteness.
I know. My point is that this idea of innovation should not be extended to any realm outside of software. By pushing themselves to become the central way to connect people, they changed and broke society: civil discourse, increased tribalism and polarization. They broke a good part of this generation: people growing up with anxiety due to a sense of inadequacy caused by seeing only the facade of their peer group (the instagram profile) and not the true depth of their characters. Doom-scrolling. Slacktivism.
These the type of bugs that should never be accepted and are hard to repair. Element client failing to ring on a call is a nuisance. I can call the person back. My teenage cousins who are growing so socially inept I worry they won't survive for a day outside of their homes without a cellphone? The arguments I had with my wife over her Instagram habit and the fact that she does not see how that relates to her insecurities/anxieties? That will be a lot more work to fix.
PCs, using the web version. One is "Verify your login" with no option to verify, only skip. The next one is "Are you sure you want to skip?", which is insulting/ironic because skipping is the only option. The third one is "Help us improve Element", which doesn't accept a no and keeps asking again and again. And just now I closed element and trying to open it again results in a white page.
> One is "Verify your login" with no option to verify, only skip.
The idea is to verify the new login on ANOTHER session, if available. This is required for reading encrypted messages. When you see this message a notification will show up on all of your other Element devices asking you to verify that new session (using a QR code or a bunch of emojis). You can also select "This wasn't me - your account may be compromised", which gives you a hint what to do next (change passwords, etc).
My best guess here is that you have some old sessions lingering around, which you should remove from your account once logged in. However you do need your Security Phrase or Security Key to recover your account, which creates a new verified session and then you can read your old encrypted messages, too.
> "Help us improve Element", which doesn't accept a no and keeps asking again and again.
This is all I get: https://ibb.co/N62J5cK
"Skip" is the only thing I can really do here.
> When you see this message a notification will show up on all of your other Element devices asking you to verify that new session
I have two element devices, both PCs at different locations. And both using the web version of Element. Am I supposed to verify the other device while logged in at both PCs at different locations?
EDIT:
And this is the "help us improve element" message that always pops up, no matter how many times I decline: https://ibb.co/WKkDHDd
I've finally had the opportunity to try it during Christmas, when I finally managed to convince a friend to try it, and I was very pleasantly surprised to the degree of polish it had both on Ubuntu and Android !
Just wanted to point out that your cert for storage.communick.com has expired. I'm assuming yours (or at least related) because mentioned with a cough :P
will https://communick.com run / configure the various bridges? setting up my own home server for matrix with bridges to existing services (inc WhatsApp) has been on my list for a while. Seems like a nice way to try and migrate slowly away from other services, and if it works well I can show my friends in a sort of like "look this is how ive done it"
The only concern I have with bridges is that I am not so sure how this affects my biggest promise - user privacy. But I am experimenting with the bridges on personal server and depending on how it goes I might have it as a separate product/offering - away from Communick.
No, we can't. Because the time aspect matters, and if you want people to switch now, the client has to be polished now, not "when it's done". And right now, it's a mess.
How hard is it to understand that "switching" is not a discrete action?
It does not have to an all-or-nothing proposition. Do it in stages.
Try this: first get yourself to use it with a few friends. See for yourself what use cases work well and what use cases don't. Bonus points if you collect this feedback and give to the team. Bring your close contacts to use it and try to make your default app, but don't beat yourself or swear it off when you can.
Upon new release, try the use cases that were failing and see what progress has been made.
Best case, you end up realizing that the new system is not as bad as you thought and you are ready to jump out of a shitty locked-in network. Worst case you spent some time learning about a free system and you are more informed and able to help those that know of no alternative and think that being spied on and manipulated is just a given.
Been using Telegram for a long time. I don't trust it any more than I do with WhatsApp (therefore, Facebook), however it is well done and thought out, has a real desktop client with a real desktop UI toolkit and enough of my contacts are on it already, therefore it's the best compromise to me. I greatly dislike Signal's UI when I tried it out and I've read about some weird decisions lately (that "using a PIN? uploading to cloud" debacle some time ago). I also believe it shouldn't require a phone number if its focus is privacy and security. Matrix would be my go to in concept, but its userbase is even smaller. At the same time, alas, I am forced to keep using WhatsApp because "everyone" is on it, and if you aren't, you're going to miss out, be it parents school chats, work groups, less tech-savvy friends, parents..
For people that are not aware: There's a Telegram FOSS [1] fork which contains all kinds of fixes; and additionally is Google Services and tracking free, which means it will run on AOSP and LineageOS without any burden of push services.
> being FOSS just in the client side, IMO changes little in comparsion with WhatsApp.
There are efforts implementing mtproto servers that are compatible with the Telegram codebase like telegramd [1] or madelineproto [2] in case you want to host your own server.
But, if decentralization is your main focus (interpreting your statement); you probably want to switch to a Matrix-based client anyways.
I like Telegram FOSS because it doesn't rely on google's infrastructure to run. That's good enough for me given I already made the questionable decision to run a chat client with a home-baked security protocol ;)
On Telegram, login on a new device and you can see your all messages automatically. On Signal, you seems to need to perform it manually, and your history will lost forever if you phone are lost or broken.
I think the first kind of "backup" is what most people would expect, because it is convenient. But to provide this convenience, it can't be full E2E, so Telegram supports secret chat when you need max security if you are willing to sacrifice convenience.
You can get the same convenience with the Signal/Whatsapp E2E type of app. All you need additionally is to keep a passphrase stored somewhere. As long as you do that you can have automatic backups that allow you to setup a new device without access to the old one and get all your history back, without losing the E2E encryption benefits by having unencrypted backups on a server somewhere. Signal UX for this is poor though.
Nothing prevents Telegram from not implementing that architecture and reading every single group message and non-secret chat. Telegram is sketchy in many ways, I wouldn't trust that easily.
Because the founder is Russian and Russophobia is very strong in the USA and Western Europe.
People find other reasons for this (“they made their own crypto”, “marketing says secure but it isn’t by default”) but the core of the argument is that Pavel Durov is Russian and he’s not trusted. If it had been Elon Musk who had created it- I have little doubt that it would be the hottest thing on the market.
I'm facing the same problems. All the people in my (real life) social circle are using WhatsApp. All of my friends are calling me crazy that I don't have Instagram, so talking about alternative messaging apps is probably not going to work. I think this is true for most people in the western culture. I value my privacy, but the struggle is to big for me.
Maybe an open-source protocol, like how e-mail works, could be a solution for this problem. That you can choose your messaging apps and that they can interfere with each other, like email clients.
There already are IM protocols. The problem is that companies prefer to create walled gardens. Even if a protocol were to take off, what usually happens is that one company leverages the protocol to gain traction, spends enough resources to build a really great user experience, and once they’ve amassed a big enough percentage of users, they toss the protocol and use something proprietary. You’d need the protocol to have at least two popular clients so that the user base is split between them. That might prevent one from dropping support for the protocol.
Thanks for your comment. I quickly searched for the IM protocols and there are plenty of open-source projects with promising functionalities.
I think that the mindset of the majority of the people is the source of this problem. Most of the people I speak to don't care about their privacy. They say that they have nothing to hide and that's a valid statement. The problem is that we don't get to choose. If someone wants to share all of their personal information it's their choice, but to not share your personal information seems almost impossible. Social standards expect that you have WhatsApp and LinkedIn and such.
I'm really shocked that people these days don't even ask for phone numbers. They ask for Instagram. I don't have it and do feel like I'm "missing out" on updates from friends. But then it reminds me how much I hated Facebook before I quit. These days my WhatsApp bio says "text me on Telegram" and usually my WhatsApp is not running on the background.
Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers. Instead of id's/email addresses/nicknames they are using your phone contact list. IMHO that's better for privacy.
That depends on what you want with privacy. If you'd want to chat anonymously, having to use your real phone number is a bummer. At least in my country, it's getting harder and harder to get a SIM-card that is not tied to your name.
The alternative is getting a burner SIM-card. Though, that will become harder once more prepaid providers require your ID.
Signal appear to have been making efforts to switch unique identifier to an arbitrary ID, I believe this is a move towards removing the phone number requirement. I can't say for sure.
I know their infra codebase pretty well as I've worked on it for projects unrelated to Signal/Open Whisper Systems. Unfortunately their public Github is usually ~3 months behind their running infra and often released much later than the equivalent functionality in the clients hits the public.
> Signal appear to have been making efforts to switch unique identifier to an arbitrary ID, I believe this is a move towards removing the phone number requirement. I can't say for sure.
> Our goal with PINs is to enable non-phone # based addressing. Since that will mean your Signal contacts can't live in your address book anymore, they're Signal's responsibility. Every other messenger does this by storing them in plaintext, but that's not private, so we built SVR.
Thanks for that. I had a quick look through their blog but couldn't find anything to reference.
It's been a few months since I worked with their codebase but at the time it relied on Intel SGX for the contact storage Enclave, which is now considered compromised[0]. Additionally, if you wanted to run your own, the requirements to get licensed to use the Enclave are non-trivial.
Opinions are my own, I represent no one, etc, etc.
Yeah I think that's still true. That said, as I understand it, the enclave is used as "proof" that they're running the server-side code they say they do (which should be protecting the data), not the data itself. I could definitely be wrong there though.
> Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers.
That does not make sense. There is no relation between 'using phone number as id' and 'storing contact list on servers'. E-mail and same other communication protocols also do not use phone numbers and do not store contact list on servers.
Yes but do they offer the same experience? Signal figured out that you probably have a list of contacts that you want to talk to. If they use mobile numbers as identifiers then they don't have to keep the contact list - it's already there on your phone. IMHO it's a good compromise.
I'm not an advocate for Signal, but I totally get this approach.
That's very reasonable then. It's not a deal breaking issue especially so moving from or compared to less trustworthy entities already having your phone number (e.g. WhatsApp), but it had left me wondering, I thought it was used in the most part for authentication.
NOTE: I don't know what Zom is so ignoring it in the below.
Viber, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema and Discord are all built on the same paradigm: accounts tied to a single service and thus the inertia of network effect makes vendor lock-in a real problem when acquisitions happen or Terms of Service change.
Signal is in theory the "best" of these 5 options in the short-term, but it being open source is utterly irrelevant when you consider the network effect lock-in of a single-service model.
In fact, Telegram is probably a "more open" option given the portability its API provides. Openness vs privacy/security are entirely different concerns in isolation, but I believe openness is most important for providing a model upon which privacy can be sustained in the longer term.
Of course Matrix is the only truly long-term sustainable option of these. Encouraging users to move to any of the others will only lead to this discussion re-occurring down the line. And being ultimately more difficult as platform-switching fatigue intensifies.
I watched that at the time. I found his insistence on comparing his 7-year-old centralised protocol to a 60-year-old federated protocol uncompelling: his point that "nothing changes with federated protocols" was slightly undermined by that gargantuan gap of inception.
Couple that with the highly conspicuous skipping over of XMPP (much more comparable, only the briefest of mentions, no mention of things like OMEMO), and ignoring of Matrix (the most comparable, and not a single mention). Overall it's a pretty ridiculous talk in this context.
He goes on to describe some challenges for federated protocols in their solutions to censorship, availability & control. On censorship, the challenges are real and it's QUITE EASY to reason about possible solutions. Many of which already exist or are in development. It's clear he hasn't spent much time thinking about this. On availability, his entire argument is "Yahoo mail exists"; his discussion here is just straight-up disingenuous. Finally, on control, he segues into unrelated areas around XMPP extensibility and seems to think extensions have no value without ubiquity (though fails to expand on his reasons for this conclusion). I'd agree XMPP's XEPs are highly flawed architecturally, but again... there's newer protocols, we've learned and evolved this already.
Leaving aside that the bulk of the middle of the talk is exclusively selling new features ("new techniques") of Signal that have no direct connection to the talk's stated topic ("distributed and decentralized technology"), there are a few salient points he made that I'd agree with:
1. Federated & decentralised protocols are by their nature harder to do, and harder/slower to change. This is true, but is by no means an absolute; it's a trade-off against other benefits.
2. E2E encrypted email is too hard and probably not worth doing. Yes, PGP is highly flawed, and in general layering encryption on top of a 60-year-old protocol is hard. (Though as above, his insistence on focusing only on email for comparison rather than Signal's direct viable competitors is telling).
3. Signal's E2E/crypto-specific innovations are cool, and current federated state-of-the-art is behind on many of them.
I think it makes more sense to use federated protocols after you've reached a certain critical mass of features and usability. Look how much Signal has improved in the last 6 months. That would be harder with a federated system as people just don't update apps. I'll buy a push for Signal to become federated when it is fully featured (which may be pretty soon). Also at that point, what is to stop people from making a federated Signal? Or creating a fork that allows contact with the centralized server AND a federated space? Is it impossible to have a mixture?
> I think it makes more sense to use federated protocols after you've reached a certain critical mass of features and usability. Look how much Signal has improved in the last 6 months.
I agree with this, but I’m starting to worry if that time will ever come. I thought messaging apps had basically all the features they’d ever need years ago. But I was wrong. I use voice messages in signal and WhatsApp daily now. If it were up to me, we would have made a federation protocol years ago and these features would have to have been figured out through endless meetings in a standards process.
I don't think federation solves that, in fact I think it makes it more difficult. Signal is open source and we're constantly seeing people complain on here about its lack of features or whatever. If we can't convince the most populous location for programmers to help in that respect then how could we do it for a federated network? And even the server is open sources. So I don't see why you couldn't have a fork that is federated. Or an app that is able to talk to both the centralized server and federated servers. It seems more a will problem than anything else and I don't see why Moxie and the Signal team would focus on these features above other features that are actually helping get people on the platform (arguably more important than any aspect).
That may be true, but I can’t encourage my social circle to move to an alternative that isn’t polished and has a great user experience for non-technical users. It’s a non starter. Even if I did, the moment they start using it and a) it’s confusing b) most of their circle is using something else, they’ll a) drop it b) ignore my future suggestions :).
Take Matrix for example. I had heard of it but hadn’t really looked into it until now. There’s no official client, so you have to find your own. That’s already a barrier of entry for someone like my mom. Then I look led through their list of client apps, and it’s the usual issues with free client apps. They don’t look great, and the reviews claim they’re rough around the edges. Even my eyes glaze over at the thought of having to try out 3-4 different clients to find the one I like.
I’d the goal is to move our communication infrastructure to use more open standards we have be realistic. And right now from what I can see, Matrix is still a solution for and by technical people. Asking my parents to move to it isn’t realistic at the moment.
For all intents and purposes, Element is the official client. It used to be called Riot, but was recently renamed.
Honestly, I think they should have just called it "Matrix". I'm guessing they didn't do that because they want to promote the concept of multiple clients without any single "official" client, but it would really simplify things.
As of now, I have to tell people "Use Matrix, but you need this app called Element to get on to it". It's confusing for a lot of people.
> As of now, I have to tell people "Use Matrix, but you need this app called Element to get on to it". It's confusing for a lot of people.
It is but I've found the email analogy helpful: prefixing your explanation with "it's like email" tends to open even non-technical people's mind to the idea of multiple clients + a unified protocol.
> Viber, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema and Discord are all built on the same paradigm: accounts tied to a single service and thus the inertia of network effect makes vendor lock-in a real problem when acquisitions happen or Terms of Service change
From a purely technical perspective. However, how organization is structured and who is in it matters:
I am in the camp that there are alot of things we try to solve (and sacrifice things like usability) at a technical level that we should be solving at a social level.
> I am in the camp that there are alot of things we try to solve (and sacrifice things like usability) at a technical level that we should be solving at a social level.
I agree in theory but unfortunately I think we need both. I have little confidence in either on it's own. And I've been burned too much by vendor lock-in in the past to ever advocate for ANY service that isn't federated (I use many non-federated services but out of necessity, I would never sell others on them).
I should add that successful & popular federated online messaging services are something we've had since the 1960s so I have yet to see any compelling reason to be perpetuating the walled-garden approach beyond a preference for a totalitarian approach to ecosystem control.
> I should add that successful & popular federated online messaging services are something we've had since the 1960s so I have yet to see any compelling reason to be perpetuating the walled-garden approach beyond a preference for a totalitarian approach to ecosystem control.
Touche, but if they were there before why aren't they "here" in popular adoption? I think, although it is perfectly technically feasible in a vacuum it is not in real life.
Because it requires that all your common contacts (friends, family) use it. The question isn't whether you can do but whether you can be easier to use and offer more feature then the competition. Most people don't care. You need to be competitive.
From a technical perceptive you will have to spend more, make less, and have decreased usability for privacy, and federation. So picking any one is already shooting your self in the foot. Pick two and you aren't going anywhere.
Simplified argument but Signal picks to minimum they feel they need to do to see change they want. And I am big fan of this method. I am tired of projects with good intentions not getting adoption.
> why aren't they "here" in popular adoption? I think, although it is perfectly technically feasible in a vacuum it is not in real life.
HN is likely not the best forum for this argument, but I'd have two answers to this:
1. Email is popularly adopted. It's difficult to add improvements because it's a federated protocol from the 60s, but it is still popular.
2. The reason we haven't had popular adoption since is because: (a) email was publicly developed, whereas most newer tech is private; the market favours easy (cheap) over better (hard, expensive) and federated is harder to do (with worthwhile benefits); and (b) the major downside of centralisation -vs- federated is vendor lock-in, which is bad for users but good for shareholders.
Email is good example of something that lasted. I think piecing it apart in more detail picking another few cases could let me clarify and solidify my arguments but like you HN is probably not the place for a detailed analysis.
Long term, I would hope that if Signal gets large enough market-share and stabilizes they would make the signal protocol federated.
I've never used WhatsApp (and only briefly tried some of the other listed messengers), but switching from one centralised and commercial system, once it runs into issues as many similar systems did before it, to another very similar system, doesn't seem quite wise. Personally I'm using XMPP and IRC for instant messaging, and tend to recommend the former: it's a nice and federated protocol, with users and software, and perhaps one of the least offenders wrt fragmentation of messengers. Was surprised to see neither of those among poll options.
A good XMPP solution for non-techs is quicksy.im (which is based on the very solid Android Client 'Conversations').
However, while I use XMPP on a daily basis, we have one big issue: There is no good iOS client. So far I have tested ChatSecure, Monal and Siskin, which all support OMEMO end-2-end encryption, but none comes even close to the quality you would expect. ChatSecure seems to be the most mature, but its development seems to have stalled and it has issues like not resuming the connection when the server changes the certificate (pretty often with letsencrypt) until the user confirms the new certificate (if the certificate is valid doesn't matter).
So I think XMPP is the right solution to the problem (being federated and an IETF standard), but the eco system is in need of developers who are willing to bring quality to the clients for all platforms.
We're working on it! Keep tabs on Monal and Siskin. Both are making frequent releases and fixing issues. Please provide feedback about any issues you encounter.
> So I think XMPP is the right solution to the problem (being federated and an IETF standard), but the eco system is in need of developers who are willing to bring quality to the clients for all platforms.
I ended up setting a web interface (converse.js) primarily for use with iOS. No push notifications with it, but also heard that iOS native clients tend to crash and lose messages, and apparently can't run in the background.
iOS doesn't let any apps run in the background. That's "fine" though, because the app can receive push notifications via Apple's push service, and that wakes up the app when you receive a message. That's supported by practically all public XMPP servers these days.
Well, what is not fine though, is the fact, that Apple neither allows other browsers on iOS nor implements the 'Push API' for Safari. This combination makes it impossible to build a chat apps using web technologies (which would lower the effort for building a client quite a lot).
I tried setting up a web-interface and I think converse.js was the least bad. It was still not great; had some issues with group chat bookmarks (I guess there are two standards?) chat-secure and monal both were very marginally better IMO.
+1, it’s crazy to imagine letting someone control the platform and influence the nature of conversations one can have.
Likewise, never used WhatsApp, and communicate with close friends and family via Signal. Once Matrix matures and robustly supports voice/video and group calls, I’ll look towards using that more actively and nudging folks towards that. For the moment, Jitsi is a good solution when needed.
(I happen to be on Discord too, but that’s mainly due to topical communities rather than social messaging. I would love for those to eventually move to Matrix too.)
Non-technical people (friends and family) seem to be fairly comfortable using Conversations on their smartphones, and converse.js seems quite user-friendly in a web browser. But it indeed doesn't always work, and there are people with whom I "only" communicate via phone, email, and in-person.
Also they don't advertise it, but it's actually still running... just no new features, no compatibility with Hangouts/etc. and of course they disabled federation.
I use Telegram long before it became sort of mainstream and I haven't regretted that decision for a minute, minus their outages that started happening once every few months lately and are worrying.
Tried Whatsapp once, hated it, never tried again. Viber is even worse.
Telegram has been what an IM program should be, for years now (it gave me the vibe of my much beloved Miranda IM almost 20 years ago). I'd love it if they added more link previews (9GAG and Instagram previews stopped working almost a year ago and the functionality was never recovered) and even more keyboard shortcuts for full navigation without a mouse -- but even without these it's the most solid IM experience I ever had.
Maybe they are not as encrypted or protected in general as Signal. Maybe (but what do we know about Signal, save for a lot of claims?). But the fact that several governments and corporations demanded them to give access to various keys or to shut down channels is a testament that Telegram isn't as amateur in encryption and protection as the overly nitpicky HN audience would have you believe.
Telegram has a broken business model from the start. It doesn't make money and it's not sustainable.
Somebody could take over telegram and start a pretty similar service to facebook since most of the chats are not encrypted. So if Durov were not to lead his vision of 100% free Telegram it might get really bad. A service ran on savings of the founder as philantropic as he is is not sustainable. They will either pivot to ads, to profiling or something paid subscription any of which will probably not be received well.
Well, then we'll migrate away to another service -- choice isn't big these days, but it does exist still. That always happened so I am not sure I can stand behind your firm pessimism about them currently.
Yeah. It rode on the "free SMS" wave for way too long and people still use it because of that... nevermind that SMS-es are free in most of the world nowadays. :D Or the fact that literally every messenger is free and most have no ads (unlike Viber which does have ads).
The very continued existence of Viber is a living testament of the glacial pace with which the non-tech folk pick up on what's wrong with some of the popular tech.
I actually think the existence of Viber is a testament to how much Western tech does not pay attention to parts of the world like Asia.
I genuinely hate the UX of Viber but since moving back to the Philippines, I've been involved in this long lesson on how much tech orgs (at least in the US) don't pay attention to these parts of the world. It seems to me that lack of care and attention leads to the rise and dominance of companies like Viber, Grab, Lazada, and their ilk in markets like the Philippines.
In the end, these apps that you and I both despise are what works best for the consumers that use them most precisely because they just work (but not well).
I like how practical a lot of Asians are. This gave rise to WeChat where you can literally do almost anything you can think of -- calling for transport and paying people included.
This made it really easy for the Chinese gov to track people but in the end people value convenience more than potential surveillance state repercussions.
We as a programmers must learn to respect that and think in terms of what's convenient for our users -- and not what's a trendy tech or some such.
The fact that Telegram can give keys to begin with is what makes it insecure. WhatsApp and Signal can't provide any keys that would decrypt a user's messages.
We don't know that for sure. We only have circumstantial evidence -- namely that Durov (and thus Telegram) escaped Russia after having been approached by intelligence services. That's all we have to go on.
Maybe he was able to break encryption and hand the keys to the agencies but preferred to escape to avoid that. Or maybe it was something else.
To be fair, I don't care much if Telegram is well-encrypted. History has shown that state actors prefer to sabotage the roots of encryption algorithms and/or embed backdoors if the service isn't truly end-to-end encrypted. But as I said, that isn't my number one concern when using messengers.
Is Matrix a good alternative to Signal? I'm currently using Signal, but I'm not entirely satisfied. My major issues are that I don't like their stance on a couple of issues: third party clients are not allowed, mobile first and desktop is only synced, phone number required, and distribution only over the app stores. Also we frequently get "encryption errors" and everybody ignores them, this is worse than with SSH key errors :-).
I like matrix, and the chat feature is pretty rock solid. However for calls and sending files it's currently not as good as Signal. I quite often have an issue with calls connecting (need several tries) while I hardly ever see this with signal. Similarly, sometimes I get failed sending of files (especially if they are big) and they somehow stay as a failed message in your chat afterwards, which is really annoying.
To a certain degree I'd say this is apples vs oranges.
Before you shoot me down, let me explain. The reason I say that is because of the core focus of the different platforms.
Signal's priority-one use-case is clearly person-to-person IM and communication. The UI, setup-process and entire architecture is optimized for this one use-case, with all other use-cases being shoehorned in to fit whatever was built for that.
I'd say Matrix (for the moment disregarding a key feature, bridging) has as its primary use-case to be a discord/slack/IRC alternative, to handle "channels", long term group chats and basically persistent online collaboration workspaces.
Sure. Technically speaking, Matrix has a full support for E2E encrypted person-to-person IM and communications (even phone-calls and audio!), and you can use it for that. But this was clearly not the primary use-case Matrix was designed to solve.
Therefore IMO Matrix person-to-person chat has this slightly shoehorned-in feeling, so you may have a somewhat lesser user-experience when using Matrix to do these things than other platforms which had this as their primary goal.
Disclaimer: Happy Matrix-user, running own server, bridging both FB, WhatsApp and Signal into the matrix-verse.
As far as I know, the Matrix protocol shouldn't be limiting when it comes to one-to-one chats.
There are already Matrix mobile clients focusing on this use case, aiming at being a WhatsApp replacement. Examples are: Ditto Chat[1], Nio[2], and FluffyChat[3].
Before trying to solve the network-effect issue (i.e. all people using WhatsApp), we should make one of the mentioned clients at least as good as WhatsApp, or else users won't switch.
I’m just saying that if you try to suggest Matrix as a “drop in” replacement for WhatsApp or other dedicated IM platforms, it may not immediately give you that “at home” feeling right now.
It’s much more capable, but different. For better and worse.
matrix-synapse(server) suffers from performance issues[1], dendrite[2], the replacement should be resolving that but is currently in beta.
Apart from that it integrates fairly well with other networks through bridges.[3]
It can be self hosted and it federates, which is a pro.
Not too sure about audits and security, it has improved much, when I started using it (2019) they didn't have login throttling[4] and shortly after that were breached.[5]
Much has improved since.
Speaking as a Matrix user: it definitely still has performance issues. I'm regularly running into sudden lag spikes that have no clear justifiable reason to exist.
I'm sure this will eventually be fixed, and honestly the performance is probably good enough for most people, but Synapse is definitely not as performant yet as a homeserver should be.
There is more metadata with Matrix but the privacy and security of message content is good. I find the UX a bit clunky because it's kind of trying to combine bits of a instant messenger with something like slack.
Yeah. I'd love to love Matrix but the clients are getting in the way.
I did find a native macOS Matrix client and quite honestly I'd love to be able to use a native client since all platforms really only have Electron apps. But the macOS client only gets me so far since I also want to use it on my phone.
If you don't care about centralized/US-based but care about privacy (I assume you wouldn't be leaving WhatsApp otherwise), go for Signal.
But if you want to avoid a repeat of what's happening with WhatsApp, support decentralized alternatives. Go for solutions that are built on Matrix or XMPP, the primary contenders in this space. Both are open networks with plenty of open-source software, public servers, paid hosting (i.e. you are not the product) and self-hosted options.
Personally I'm in the XMPP camp, and working on https://snikket.org/ specifically as an alternative to WhatsApp and the other centralized services.
I think one of the main problems protocols like XMPP and Matrix have to solve is the combination of good crypto + decentralization + offline-capability.
I have been using Signal since before it was even called Signal (TextSecure and RedPhone), and I must say it has really refined itself over the years. It's pretty easy to set up these days, and I have more non tech oriented friends switching over seamlessly. I use Signal's voice and video calling features as well without any issues.
Telegram is a downgrade in terms of both security and privacy. Just leaving the comment for people who consider it. It's an excellent platform and a joy to use but I personally refuse to use it.
I'm referring to two things(although really just one) here
- WhatsApp claims to store messages only as long as they are undelivered, after which they are purged from their servers. Even if they are retained, they are e2e encrypted. Telegram on the other hand, from what I can see, store all messages in plaintext or in an encrypted-at-rest form where they control and have access to the keys. It comes down to whether I trust them, and I have no reason to.
- Tying back into the encryption point, in the event of a breach or an MITM, whoever intercepts or accesses WhatsApp messages will get encrypted dumps, while my Telegram messages are pretty much going to be in plaintext.
Also, the option to delete on a periodic basis is not an alternative to not having things stored in the first place. That said, there is no way you can verify that copies are not retained on the servers in either case (WhatsApp or Telegram) so there's not much to argue there.
Clients are open-source, so you can see the code for e2e encryption.
> That said, there is no way you can verify that copies are not retained on the servers in either case (WhatsApp or Telegram) so there's not much to argue there.
This is exactly true, so I actually prefer Matrix.
Also adding to this, there is certainly more nuance to it and WhatsApp is certainly far from perfect in that you still trust them to implement E2EE correctly without incompetence or malice, and then there's the whole other issue of their cloud backups being entirely unencrypted by design. Thankfully the latter can be turned off for now.
I think they’re referring to the encryption. Group chats can’t be encrypted end-to-end, direct messages aren’t by default, and the direct messages that are encrypted (”secret chats”) aren’t available on the desktop client.
... but still a company that you have to "trust". I'd rather have a protocol that will allow me to not trust anyone and still be secure/private by default.
IMO Telegram is more similar to Facebook Messenger than WhatsApp from a security and privacy standpoint. Both do not use end-to-end encryption by default (but both have a separate end-to-end encrypted private chat mode).
Don't forget Apple pressured Telegram to remove rooms or be banned.
This type of pressure on centralized systems is exactly why it is unethical as technologists to suggest people centralize the internet.
When you choose to send friends to centralized systems you are voting for the internet to have all the problems and advantages of dictatorships.
When you support open decentralized protocols you get the problems and advantages of a democracy.
Dictatorships can move fast and make sweeping changes. Look at China.
Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage are all examples of centralized walled gardens, aka dictatorships. They are all doomed to be co-opted into doing something you don't like at some point and you will have no recourse.
Meanwhile we have decentralized systems like like HTTP, SMTP, and Matrix. Yes they move slower, are more fragmented, need long periods of carefully discussed and rolled out protocol changes and many implementations and servers to all agree on those to function. Decentralized control is messy, and good UX takes longer to materialize, but that is how the internet was built, and how we kept it from being controlled by a single ISP/Browser like AOL.
If you want a modern e2e chat protocol that lets you use any client, server, operating system, or architecture you want and take your social graph with you when you change your mind on any of those things, where no one single entity can change the rules of the network
for profit or other reasons... you are looking for Matrix.
> Don't forget Apple pressured Telegram to remove rooms or be banned.
Apple pressured Telegram to remove specific posts. There was no way to stop spamming the posts, so they removed the whole channel because it was a lot easier.
It's not really "good enough" for them. Some criminals seem to use it but it's just a matter of reputation. It doesn't offer any extra privacy over whatsapp.
By default anyone at telegram can read your messages. By default, nobody at Facebook can read your WhatsApp messages. Telegram is a privacy downgrade here.
Facebook could push an update tomorrow that subtly modifies the RNG in a very difficult to detect way that allows them to easily brute force all messages.
No published source code or alternative implementations so it may take months of RE to notice if it is ever noticed at all.
If only a single party with no accountability controls your encryption keys with binaries they compiled from code they wrote that no one else can practically review with an undocumented protocol they can silently change or backdoor at any time, it is not end to end encryption. It is marketing.
I hate and refuse to use Telegram like all centralized chat services and feel it is hostile to freedom, privacy, and security but unlike Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage and others Telegram at -least- lets independent third parties like F-droid compile and distribute binaries offering accountability for their E2E claims.
Their e2e encryption only applies to 1-to-1 communication in the form of Secret Chats, which can be opened from a menu multiple clicks away. Default chats and group chats are not e2e encrypted and contents are fully visible to Telegram. This however enables lot of the features Telegram has that Whatsapp/Signal do not (seamless use with multiple clients, powerful search, history is retained after switching phones etc..)
- Weird hand-rolled crypto protocol of questionable quality (MTProto). Probably fine in practice, but leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and their marketing to prove it made it worse. It has been through a few revisions since initial scrutiny.
- Only Secret Chats are E2EE. Normal use is just subject to transport encryption. However, this is true for any platform with server-side chat history.
I like Session[1]. It's snappy, simple, and built on an onion network like Tor. Their private group chats can handle something like 20 people but I believe that this will expand in the near future. Plus they expressed interest in using Arweave[2] as a decentralized storage option, which seems cool to me.
I am also interested in Berty[3] and Iris[4], but those aren't really "ready" yet, despite being cool tech.
Interesting. I just installed it and found it simple to set up. I like that it doesn't need to access my contacts but I think that might hinder its adoption
You uninstall WhatsApp and tell your closest family and friends that they can only reach you on Signal. Because you are so important to them, they will install Signal as a backup/secondary app. Other people will do the same, and it will snowball into everyone having Signal installed and at some point people will realise that the network effect is gone.
This is happening. First they get surprised that communication is possible beyond WA, even exactly the same. My mother's reaction was hilarious after sending me photos from Signal, free of charge. She was thinking only WA is free, every other app will charge her. I had to explain that calling, voice or video is also possible, without any payment.
How is free sustainable for Signal? I understand why WA is free based on data collection, but Signal just seems too benevolent toward its users. I read up on Signal Foundation (Acton and Marlinspike) as a non-profit which is being buoyed along by $100M from Acton. Mozilla is a non profit too, but it gets money from Google for placing Google search in Firefox. Where is the long term cash flow for Signal?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the WhatsApp founders, between the two of them, can easily sponsor Signal’s lean team for decades. (Since they’ve shown the inclination with substantive initial investments already, I’d imagine that they’ll happily keep funding if Signal continues to be used)
I was looking for this information as well. They have a donation page - https://www.signal.org/donate/ - unlike the Mozilla Foundation/Firefox, so if enough people decide to use it, and to make regular(ish) donations, it could work. See Wikipedia.
How much does it cost to run such a system and pay a dozen employees? $10m a year? Besides donation Signal does get money from the US gov because while we complain about encryption here we also realize that giving people in other countries an encrypted free form of communication helps them be freer. Our military also encourages the use because it is better that soldiers talk to their wives, partners, friends with that app than an unencrypted means and have the potential for blackmail. Same goes for politicians and many famous people (Joe Rogan recently mentioned he uses it). There is a strange dichotomy of pro and anti-encryption with the gov. But Signal does have a lot of funders and it isn't just your average person.
> You uninstall WhatsApp and tell your closest family and friends that they can only reach you on Signal. Because you are so important to them, they will install Signal as a backup/secondary app.
I'll be the one friend that'll insist on SMS/email. I’ll even offer to use some other supposedly encrypted method like Keybase or Matrix. If that doesn't work as a fallback, then I guess we can agree to disagree, and someone else can play the middleperson for us. :)
I refuse to use Signal because it doesn't offer chat sync, or message preservation if I either lose or have to wipe my phone.
One of the benefits of Signal is that it can also do SMS on Android, so it works great with people like you who insist on using that. Your SMS messages will appear right alongside the native Signal ones in the app.
That was my thought process evaluating alternatives this morning. Signal is apparently lauded by the privacy crowd, but I took one look at it and said "no way is Mum going to use this".
I went with Telegram because the usability was good, WhatsApp-like functionality, and I saw a few people I know already on it - non-techies in particular, which is vital if we're going to disrupt WhatsApp.
So one of the key differences was that when I loaded Telegram, I had a list of contacts ready to go, people who already had Telegram. I sent a message to a few people via iMessage using the "Invite Friends" menu item.
When I tried Signal, I saw an empty list and had to add numbers / find people myself. Not much in the way of onboarding IMO. My complaints are likely met with "duh, that's how it works, idiot", I believe that's just how Signal is designed as it's a privacy-centric app.
I'm just looking for a non-Facebook WhatsApp alternative, rather than a complete focus on privacy and E2E messaging, so I don't think Signal is "bad" but it's not what I'm looking for. I just want Facebook out of my life and its grubby hands off my data.
I installed both Telegram and Signal yesterday and both showed me a list of my contacts on their platforms. The list was actually substantially longer on Signal, in fact.
There were some permissions settings that I didn't pay close attention to, but maybe you didn't allow the app to control your calls or see your contacts on setup?
When I switched family on Xmas day 2019 it took hours for contact data to sync so that it was possible to message each other. WhatsApp setup took seconds to propagate. Luckily I was eventually able to persuade it was worth waiting for signal.
I saw someone with this issue on HN the other day. Though I've never had that myself, you can apparently pull down to refresh the contact list within Signal after tapping the "write new message" (white pen on blue background) icon.
lots of my friends have both whatsapp and telegram
and now some of them are almost exclusively on telegram and some on whatsapp
and whats worse is,now there are some half-and-half conversations in both
and on top of that whatsapp rolled out business accounts and every mom and pop store has whatsapp and thats the only way you can communicate with them in real time
You won't get them to switch and I use both. I try to get people to switch to Signal for comms with me and the hope is that if more people install it then they'll use it to communicate with each other. The majority of my contacts have not installed it. I am not yet worried enough about the current state of whatsapp that I'm willing to forgo using it entirely.
Signal, at least, is a very easy install and will just locate your contacts by their phone numbers (like WhatsApp) so the technical barrier is very low.
Edit: Oh, I came in to this thread without seeing anything about this new privacy policy. My comment was about the state before that. I'm only looking at the change now.
I'm over here confused about how so many people are using Whatsapp. Is this is the United States or other countries? No one I know uses Whatsapp over here.
I did however do what others are suggesting. I installed Signal, and told my close family and friends to install it to communicate with me - and to not use standard SMS anymore.
While I did get a bit of grief over it initially, we are all happily using Signal now, and more people I know are moving to it all the time.
It's also a great middle ground for iPhone and Android users to communicate.
You're absolutely right. Which is why any alternative we DO deem worth evangelizing should absolutely not have the same vendor lock-in problem as WhatsApp has. Which Signal and most of the alternatives listed do: they are single-service clients.
If we do manage to migrate some/any of our friends away from the embedded plethora of contacts they have on WhatsApp, I really hope it's towards something like Matrix, or similar, that doesn't have that same problem.
- Matrix is for now (like Discord) more of "slack like" service alternative (but has potential to become more than that).
- Telegram might be the easiest to use where you likely find the most people but I disagree with a lot of things done by/around telegram.
- Threema (now open source) is as far as I know the most privacy focused one and by far my favorite. I like the way they are doing many thinks and they have many small goodies (like you can give a small "thump up/down" to messages in 1-to-1 chats from the message received notification to indicate agreement/acceptance). Or the way they handle accounts (separate from phone number and license, you can give people your Threema id without giving them your phone, the "trust levels", etc.). Or that they have a clear&clean business model. There are also a bunch of aspects which are useful if used in a e.g. business context like account revoke-ability, in person QR code based key exchange, fixed chat history etc.
> Matrix is for now (like Discord) more of "slack like" service alternative (but has potential to become more than that).
More specifically, I would say Element (the most popular Matrix client) is more of a "slack like" alternative, but most other mobile Matrix clients are much more WhatsApp-like.
Most of my contacts (tech-oriented, Europe-based) are using Threema and I am most happy with it, especially because I do not have to share my phone number (or complete address book!). And the new video call capability is also working well. Unfortunately, most of the family is WhatsApp only. Since I will not use anything Facebook, they either have to use SMS or contact me via my wife.
Signal, for a long time. I see myself responsible for spreading the message, educating my inner circle, family and friends, helping them migrate if they are willing to. This became a duty for me, as I've been saved from FB products for a long-time ago, thanks to people enlighten me. And life is pretty much the same without them. Don't care what others say, I'm not old school, even I'm pretty old. I can message people one way or another, sms or Signal currently. But none of them matters, the psychological trap that they put us, life is hard, even not possible without any of the products they (we) are producing, is just absurd.
I never blamed technology or any algorithms, people was evil before and still the same. I'm so glad, the folks here that I find brilliant, is having this conversation. Just keep the dialogue going, it is working. Change happens in small steps, one people, one family, one neighbourhood at a time.
Is there any unbiased analysis of the implications of the WhatsApp change of policy? The most popular HN story on the subject [1] tells us little about that.
As far as I can tell, the TL;DR of the change is that your WhatsApp identifier will be linked to your FB data, so that personalized advertisements can be displayed in WhatsApp.
The only detail I find highly objectionable in the change, is FB collecting through WhatsApp "Other people’s phone numbers stored in address books." Why don't we focus on the objectionable parts of the change, rather than panicking that there was a change?
Moreover, a less popular HN story [2] mentions that "The new privacy policy also doesn’t apply in Europe due to stronger privacy legislation there." (I can confirm that on my side: I'm living in Europe and I haven't seen the dreaded popup yet.)
It isn't even clear to me what is really changing or whether it matters... WhatsApp has had a feature they have been working on with Facebook for a while to allow Facebook business pages to maintain a presence on WhatsApp with a hosted client (something you might appreciate being useful for a lot of companies), and as far as I know this is just that.
> The move, the spokeswoman said, is part of a previously disclosed move to allow businesses to store and manage WhatsApp chats using Facebook's infrastructure. Users won't have to use WhatsApp to interact with the businesses and have the option of blocking the businesses. She said there will be no change in how WhatsApp shares provide[d] data with Facebook for non-business chats and account data.
I've tried many, many times to figure out how to use Matrix, and every time I can't make headway. I haven't included it in the options because after trying every six months or so to figure out how to talk one of my colleagues through it I've just given up.
Maybe it's time to try again, but all the docs seem to be written by people who assume the wrong things about their readers.
What do you mean? What kind of problems are you running into? Elements has a trivial 2 taps flow to get to "new direct message", so I'm curious what could go wrong.
We switched to Signal & finding Signal consumes too much of data. I think the video & audio resolution is excellent in Signal - that could be one reason. I do not find a way to reduce quality thereby reduce data consumption. For developing countries like India, this is important.
This is an interesting problem with true E2E solutions. The person sending you the image would need to send it with lower resolution. There is no way for the server to do it for you.
The servers also don't store messages once they been delivered. There is no way to get a low resolution while mobile and getting the higher resolution while on WiFi.
Signal does already have the method to disable media downloads while not on WiFi, but does not have a method to tell the sender to send lower fidelity content.
The only reason me and my circle of friends use Telegram is because one of us was using an Ubuntu Phone at some point, and that was the only acceptable messaging app he could use, so we all moved on. It requires a certain authority in your group, but people are likely to adapt to you if they care about you, even if your choices inconvenience them slightly.
Of course it's never going to be "all their contacts", but the only platform that actually has all my contacts on it is good old SMS anyway.
I also use Telegram because one of my friends was really stubborn. Like many here, I think it's a great service/client but probably has some security issues (although they are largely trade-offs). However, I don't agree that my example backs your view: there's no way I could get my other friends and family to switch en-masse. I still only use it pretty much with that one friend and a small group around him. And all the others say the same: they hate on the guy for being a pain despite liking the app.
Sometimes its about opportunity. I've been using Telegram for years with just a handful of people (and a bunch of bots...love Telegram's API). About 8 months ago my niece discovered that WhatsApp was owned by Facebook (so uncool) and switched to Telegram all on her own. I took that opportunity to onboard my mom and sister who then brought on some mutual friends. And just like that...WhatsApp was gone from my phone! This new agreement might hatch similar opportunities.
Here in Japan literally everyone uses LINE and it is far better than WhatsApp. Way more features, it's independent and the business model is sane and clear.
I just switched my family to it, because that was the last reason for me to use WhatsApp.
LINE seems to be the predominate messenger in all of Asia.
I find it highly interesting to see even the Japanese rely on this Korean Plattform. Do they not fear a service blockage based on their countries political relationship?
I like conversations. The app is straight forward and it uses xmpp with omemo encryption. Therefore, there is no "lock in" (https://conversations.im/).
I guess Signal would be the best bet as an alternative because of where it is right now in terms of market share.
Discord doesn’t need to be bought by Google to be a huge privacy concern. No end-to-end encryption or even claims to not read direct messages, closed source, third-party clients are banned…
There are many things that can happen to a non-profit that can change the way they provide software or a service. Apart from a sale being possible (albeit with regulator approval), a non-profit could split (see MozillaCorp), or simply act against its own stated interest due to internal politics (see PIR).
Or the change could be smaller such as the non-profit changing focus and transferring one of it's products to another entity. e.g. Signal could hypothetically pivot to focus on crypto lib dev/maintenance and transfer the messaging service maintenance to another org.
Brian Acton, WhatsApp co-founder, one who left Facebook post-acquisition, infused 50M USD into Signal. And, Signal is community-supported through donations. I hope that Signal remains here for a long time.
It is strange he moved from seeing a centralized messenger project he founded be morphed into a monster, only to double down and invest in yet another privacy hostile centralized messaging system hoping for a different result.
Anything not decentralized is going to get abused eventually.
The US government could seize the client signing keys, release s backdoored client, and dump the SGX keys and gag order everything in the name of national security. We have seen similar play out in China. Even the mighty Apple gave up HSM keys and caved to CCP censorship demands. It is only a matter of time.
I fear they are well meaning but woefully naive.
We need censorship resistant standard protocols anyone can implement and help host so there is no SPOF.
Moxie doesn't care about sellout money. As I understand it he wants to run signal as a lifestyle business, and he has private donors keeping everything afloat. I'm not sure if it'll stay independant if Moxie ever leaves, but hopefully there's a stable org structure. Source: The JRE podcast he did a couple months back.
Also if they ever sell out, the server & clients are completely opensource. It wouldn't take much for someone else to fork the whole thing and run a competing service if we ever need to.
Telegram is not just another electron app, it has a great desktop client and uses minimal resources. It uses mostly c++ and qt last I checked, which makes for a great crossplatform experience too. It behaves like a desktop application, not a webapp (yes we can tell that there is a difference). So telegram gets +1 from me.
Definitely I think its between Telegram and Signal. With Signal, there is definitely that comfort level of knowing that your information/chats are secure, but I have found it to be slightly less user friendly in terms of setting up chats/group chats etc. Its also not as widely used compared to Telegram.
With Telegram, I have been using it more recently and found it to be even effective in a work-setting for group chats, sharing files etc. Its basically a Slack and the fact that it is available on multiple platforms also has made it very appealing.
I have been using matrix mostly as an IRC/Gitter client but also for a small number of non-technical friends. It is making excellent progress but has a long way to come. However I do think it is the right investment due to the direction and funding it has.
Some weak points (based on using element.io clients which has some features that aren't core matrix):
- Cross-session signing is not natural to set up for users, however this likely isn't much of an issue as most of these will just use it on their phone. However this can also be an issue if they want to switch device but lost their keys.
- e2e verification is a bit awkward. No great TOFU option which makes initial setup a bit awkward, you can do it but the UI doesn't encourage it. It would also be interesting to have the option to "share" your verification. So if friend X says they trust these keys for friend Y I can import Y without further verification.
- Occasionally new devices don't want to send messages to the remote user's session. So the user just gets a "Message encrypted" notification with no indication to me that I sent a message not encrypted to all of the user's sessions.
- Voice + Video is super basic for 1:1 calls. For >2 users it uses Jitsi which is fantastic but this different UX between the two is also confusing. I'm hoping that when Jitsi launches e2e encrypted calls it can just be used for everything.
- Visually the app is cluttered and not perfectly clear. For 1:1 calls "bubbles" such as used by most chat apps are super clear. Matrix uses a design better for many user chats but can be less clear. Especially replies look a bit odd in Element.
- URL previews are only supported on web and need to be turned on per-chat (if encrypted). This is for legitimate privacy reasons but is a sacrifice of UX.
Overall once you get it set up it just works and has all of the features that a user would expect. However I'm looking forward to a lot of the polish landing which will make it compelling on UX grounds alone, whereas now it just seems like the best compromise when you consider the privacy and decentralization features.
The obvious issue here is that we're intrinsically bound to the services that the people you talk with are themselves locked into. The pressure of your local crowd is surely a stronger determinant of which IM app(s) you use over the ones you like the best.
So yeah, I don't like Facebook's malevolent dictatorship over WhatsApp, but there's zero chance I could - or even would bother to - convince all my friends and family to make the switch.
No option for RCS? It's a true successor to SMS and you can switch providers without losing anyone in your contacts. Although I am not really sure how easy it will be to switch clients and use something 3rd party
While Google is the main implementer of RCS servers and clients, a few larger carriers have done their own implementation of it, with no need for Google.
Client side, I believe Samsung had their own implementation for it? And Apple could make iMessage RCS compatible, they just have chosen not to at this point.
> a few larger carriers have done their own implementation of it
And that's why I think RCS shoot itself into the foot.
I understand that Google does want to accelerate RCS implementation, and some carriers have actively chose to use Jibe.
The main problem I think is that RCS is not differentiated from SMS, especially for those who have a carrier which didn't deployed it yet. In well-developed areas, it make full sense not to differentiate it. However, I don't think (and have some anecdotal evidence) that RCS was not designed to handle the (relatively) common case of an RCS user sending RCS to an "RCS" contact while that contact is offline. In certain areas, data connectivity is not cheap which means that the user explicitly controls mobile data connectivity and Google is amplifying the problem by actively prompting the user to use RCS even when the carrier does not support it. This leads into important messages not being received, which makes sense if RCS replaced another IP-based communication protocol but SMS is circuit-switched and does not rely on IP infrastructure, and more importantly SMS is much, much reliable relative to RCS (especially if it is not officially supported by the carrier).
The teleco stack will switch to IP based completely with 5G, makes no sense to keep RCS in old circuit-switched based SMS. Soon no data will mean no calls/text/anything since data will be all that telecos will provide
And how many years this will last? Mind you that while some countries are already solely running on 4G, there are other countries still having a large 2G phone usage and large 3G data usage. It is only fair to compare it to this - otherwise it would be unfair to those who rely on older technologies to connect to the world.
I need to point out that I do not really disagree with RCS' intent - but Google aggressively trying to promote RCS outside of commited carriers is not just weird but can be dangerous.
We can't keep supporting old tech in new world. 2G and 3G is already two decades old, we gotta move on. And I am not talking about killing SMS. 2G/3G will still support SMS, only 4G/5G has to adopt to RCS and use SMS as fallback (like it already does)
Having RCS is still better than being in current situation where you're locked into Whatsapp/iMessage/Some proprietary solution from a carrier
Totally missed opportunity for RCS IMHO. If RCS was available worldwide (I believe it is mostly still US only) along with encryption, it would have been the obvious choice for most people by now since it would allow users to use their favorite (RCS supported) app
The problem is that at least here in EU lots of social groups are on WhatsApp. So switching away from WhatsApp is not always feasible (unless you're willing to compromise your social life and some business interactions too).
A more practical solution might be not to switch from WhatsApp entirely, but to limit the amount of data it can get from you. Some ideas:
- trimming the contact list to the minimum; move most conctacts from the builtin phone address book (Google Contacts) to another store for contacts, which is not integrated with the system
- getting a separate phone just for WhatsApp; different account, different number, different contact list
- revoke most of the app permissions, use only the most essential features (basically text)
- post new _content_ elsewhere
- FB will probably try to track / intercept links in the app; setting Duck Duck Go as the default browser might help (purge browsing data often)
I'm not sure how far iOS 14 privacy features will go. It's their time to shine. If they do prevent WhatsApp and Facebook apps from doing shady stuff, it might be a time to switch.
Sadly the inertia of WhatsApp is something hard to escape.
I would/do choose Signal with a few of my tech savvy friends. But the majority of people I know use WhatsApp, and consequently so do I.
I know various people who are not tech savvy, and use Signal. It doesn't require a lot of skill to use Signal; on the contrary. IMO, if you can use WhatsApp, you can use Signal. Some features like Axolotl and 2FA even overlap. That's why I decided to switch away from WhatsApp to Signal. Whoever doesn't follow can send me SMS or e-mail.
That's been like that for a long time, several times a month I receive a notification that someone I know comes into Telegram, and even my close family is going into Signal bit by bit.
But yeah, here whatsapp is the biggest one still and too many people are using it.
Wire is pretty popular in my social circles, less so lately, unfortunately.
The "always on" encryption is great, and it's always been more stable, and had a more complete feature set than Signal, even at launch. Most importantly, migration between devices with Wire is super smooth.
In SG, some government services are big users of WhatsApp. For instance, I was recently placed in 14 days quarantine (stay home notice) after arriving from overseas. All contact with the department of immigration / border protection was via WhatsApp during those two weeks. They would also call us to do control samples at random hours to check that we are in the hotel room.
It’s very convenient of the government to do this, but I do find it a bit dubious at time to mix provision of essential services with FBs marketing tracking. The same with government websites that use Google Analytics, I’m not always sure they should be mixed without thinking properly through the privacy considerations first.
I just have joined Discord because, I joined a language class and needed some way to communicate to the classmates. And all other people are on whatsapp, and hence it became official channel of communication. A fellow classmate was kind enough to join discord to have discussions and give me updates.
Due to network effects, whatsapp still holds lion share. It is not a problem if it is optional tool that has to be used just for talking to friends. But, I am seeing it is being used for even communicating to school children by teachers and schools as almost official channel! In such cases, there does not exist much choice, at least in my country. People just refuse to use mail or call directly.
I've been using Signal for years now and although it still has its flaws (requirement for a phone number, PIN number debacle), it is IMHO the best alternative and I've moved my sginificant other, friends and families towards it.
Combined with signal-cli (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli.git) you can easily set up your own files & messaging upload. For instance, I've created an automatic upload to a Google Photos album for my family group chat and they love it !
Is there an easy way to export ALL data (voice notes, photos, video, and text) from WhatsApp? Last time I tried to do it there was a 10K message limit (which I have significantly exceeded). And I saw some tool to try and get access to the Google Drive backup[0], but I couldn't get it working properly.
I'm gonna stay on WhatsApp. Can't beat convenience. Also good luck getting granny and grandpa to move to some weird ass app that barely works or has weird onboarding or unintuitive UX.
Matrix & Signal is the best I've found so far. The new Matrix (Element) client is good & people have a much easier time signing up and connecting. Overall pleased.
Matrix is okay, hopefully will be better someday, but I've had a pretty good time with XMPP the last few months. If you stick to Dino and Conversations (maybe Gajim too), the OMEMO is easier and more reliable to get working than Matrix's encryption, and you can turn it off. I mainly use Matrix unencrypted because they don't let you turn it back off, and it feels like most of my contacts don't understand the device naming and verification stuff. (also sometimes device verification just doesn't work). XMPP is also a LOT less laggy. Closer to IRC feel.
I still use Matrix, but it's often frustrating with messages showing up late or out of order, and none of the clients feeling quite good enough yet. Especially if you use multiple accounts.
Every XMPP client I've used supports multiple accounts, but for Matrix I've only recently run into Quaternion which supports this, and I believe also Neochat (they both use libquotient), but they're still rough to use.
I wouldn't even consider options that aren't free software, and I'd also exclude signal because of them not putting their app on f-droid, not being properly decentralized, relying on a phone number, etc. (note that both email and phone number are optional for Matrix accounts)
The two that stand out are telegram and signal, and which is better for you depends on your personal balance of usability vs. privacy.
I personally can't use signal. It's great that it's secure, but I can't tolerate frequent reliability issues when it comes to messaging. The first thing that comes to mind is group chat, and having messages show up in a different order on everyone's phones (discovered via screenshots), often with multiple-hour delays.
Where is Wire? Open source, free personal accounts available, can deploy on-prem (or in your own cloud), and can be used in a web browser rather than needing an installed client like Signal. Best of all: you don't need a phone number to set up an account!
Check it out for yourself; set up a free personal account at this link:
I would say Signal, for now. Since last year when the European Commission urged its staff to switch from WhatsApp to Signal, I've noticed a lot more of my contacts becoming available on Signal.
I've been using Signal for some time; I preferred Wire, but gradually it became clear that Wire was only interested in corporate clients. One bonus compared to Signal is that you don't need to tie it to a phone number.
I would recommend you start with whatever looks best to you, then keep trying solutions with friends who are up for it until you've found something that works. This question is also really dependent on your own and your friends' threat models so general advice is only marginally useful here.
Personally I use Telegram because there's a distribution of it on F-Droid. If you do you should consider telling your friends to only use secret chats since only those are encrypted end-to-end. Signal has some nice features like not storing your in-app contacts on their servers and the "sealed sender" feature which largely hides who is talking to whom in a conversation.
As for the others I can't really comment on them. Maybe another option to consider is Briar[1] which works entirely peer-to-peer over Tor, Bluetooth or the LAN and defers sending until both devices are online at the same time (which might work for phones).
Email would have been a good choice too, my personal experience of ditching Chat in favor of non-real-time communication has resulted in more thoughtful communication, besides eliminates the need for converting your contacts from their favorite chat app.
End-to-End encryption is something which cannot be enforced for all communications(contacts) with email.
From your list I've extensively used Telegram and Whatsapp. I love the former and hate the latter. I'm going to tell you why.
I used telegram seriously, to connect to my team members, connect to friends in groups and message friends privately, before our government blocked it and people migrated to whatsapp.
Usability:
1-Whatsapp is only available on one phone (I know it's because of e2e encryption, but we'll get to that later) and only android/ios. Anything else needs to use web and connect to the main device, which limits the experience, if you use it heavily.
2-Whatsapp does not have edit, the web version cannot set ctrl-enter to send, any mistaken enter will send an incomplete message that cannot be edited.
3-You lose all your chats when you change your phone. Backup is still a solution, but not if you want to migrate from iphone to android (something I did) and do not trust an app that has 100 install to migrate your data.
4-You cannot use multiple phone numbers by one whatsapp on one phone.
5-If you add a person to a group, they cannot see past messages. (I know, another side-effect of e2e)
6-It has many minor bugs with bluetooth headsets. If you press the answer, it just disconnects from the headset, you should answer on phone screen.
7-Lacks many useful features for organization, like chat folders (I know, this is also recent in Telegram)
On the other hand, telegram is heavily customizable, has clients for all major platforms, can connect to many accounts at once, your data is not tied to your device.
About E2e encryption:
I don't mind that telegram does not have e2e. My private messages are not worth the effort for a large organization or government. As a citizen of a country where the government actively and strongly suppresses freedom of speech, e2e in groups is not useful. Any breached device or one informer in any group is enough for all messages to be breached. This is only needed in case the government does not have access to the (apparently infinite) list of security problems by whatsapp, which apparently they do (why they block Telegram and not whatsapp?)
In usability, I can go on and on with increasingly detailed differences between whatsapp and Telegram and everywhere Telegram wins hands down, except that by default, chats do not have e2e encryption and groups cannot have e2e at all.
It is a big weakness, that the companies cannot be force to state if they are acting as a platform or as a publisher.
I think companies are way too power full right now, and the ability to shift position, sometimes they are a platform and sometimes a publisher.
Companies should not be allowed to "shift" depending on how asks the question.
I think a normal human would be forced to answer (in court), if they said different answer to different people.
But these companies get away with it.
Much of the conditions that has helped shape the current situation might shaping new efforts as well..
Support and client questions etc will probably be avoid as much as possible.
Example do NOT explain why a BAN was issued, give as little chance to appeal as possible, and avoid all discussions about why something was done.
Just say that they broke a rule, do not mention what rules or where in the text / video the "crime" was committed.
Appeal process is very expensive, and if a company gave reason for example when they did a BAN that would sometime cause the banned person to appeal.
If they stated why, a person in USA could appeal using the common justice system and perhaps claim in-justice, or lying
(I guess a person might have a chance if the company did not apply its rule consistently, or if they could prove a lie)
If they can avoid to given any reason for it, there is no way they will keep any rules well defined, it gives them much more power if the rules could be flexed a bit.
I think the "common justice system" with defender, accuser and judge would be much better.
A court also has to keep record of decisions and reasons.
But I think no company would do that, it would limit their control/power and probably be expensive as well.
I still think the companies have a bit too much power, and in a way wonder if they could be forced to solve "justice" better than now.
WhatsApp has been a more or less indie creation helped to cut cost of text messages to zero. Then it was acquired by FB and is now part of big tech. We all know what this means.
With signal as a notable exception, I doubt that there could ever be a different outcome for any commercial product.
Why is it, that we do not see more competition from non-profits? The tech world has changed so much, that the ideas of the open source/free software movement are not as applicable as they were when Stallman founded GNU. However, with Wikipedia we see a worldwide Top10 site being a non-profit.
So, where are all the Google/Twitter/Facebook competitors funded by contributions of its users? Given how hard and expensive it is to really compete in that space, is the goal unrealistic? Or is it that there are some (hidden) incentives in the game which contradicts that goal? (Other than monetary incentives for the founders)
LINE [1] - is a very popular messenging app in SEA, Japan and Korea. It's more of a service suite (food delivery, news/entertainment streams etc.) but at the core it's a really good messenger. Key features that I like:
- Great user-driver sticker ecosystem. Creators can submit their sets to the store and earn pasive income; there's even an sticker creation app [2]
- modern, good UX and web-client with default E2E encryption.
- ability to login with an account rather than phone number exclusively.
- chat extras: photo albums, event calendars etc. especially great for group chats.
- original quality photo sharing.
It's a bit bloated being a full service suite and all but underneath it all it's a really good messenging experience!
I argue that LINE is really suck for multiple device support. LINE won't allow multiple iOS/Android device login (unless using "Lite" app or iPad app only for messaging) and basically the app stores messages and other data on the device. They requires to user to manually backup the data to cloud storage when changing device between same OS. The most pain is that they still don't implement data transfer between iOS/Android so chat log and other data is disappeared. Modern chat apps mush not like this.
I'm already using Signal as a secondary messaging service (since someone I know didn't use WhatsApp) so I'll just switch to that.
Luckily I don't have any friends on WhatsApp, so the transition will be easier. Let's see if my family cares enough about messaging me that they'll download Signal.
> I'm already using Signal as a secondary messaging service (since someone I know didn't use WhatsApp) so I'll just switch to that
This 100%. So many responses talk about the "network effect", but realistically it only needs that one key person in everyone's phone book who refuses to use WhatsApp in order to move entire swathes of people to install Signal at least as a secondary app. Be that one person!
One thing I'd like to know about any messaging platform is how easy it is to export my messages for backup purposes.
Signal, for example, seems to be designed to store messages only on a single active device, which is normally a mobile device. Lose access to your device, perhaps to theft, maybe to accidental damage or hardware failure, and you lose all your messages.
I'm all for privacy, but security matters too, and that includes being able to keep safe copies of my own data on my own terms. With things like emails, or even mobile SMS messages, there are tools widely available to do this, and I can export my data and have it encrypted locally and then stored safely off-site. Too many new messaging systems seem to be fighting against this for various reasons, and I don't think it's a healthy trend.
Google Messages have E2E encryption and support SMS, if other party doesn't have Chat feature, only comparable app is Signal, I used it for years until I gave up after nagging PIN popup, during this period I experienced extensive problems with sending/receiving problems if you often switch between mobile network and WiFi Signal is very slow to recognize this and choose the best network, while Whatsapp does this almost instantly
Signal has also pretty horrible management, I remember one day outage for many house because admins in US just went sleep, so Signal is all nice if you dont care about reliability and can get through bad UX, for instance very well hidden option for force sending SMS to Signal contact through long tap Send button, there is now ay to find this during using the app
Why not came back to plain old email? The email delivery system is decentralized and can support p2p encryption. You can have "chat-like" user experience with apps like Mailtime (https://mailtime.com/)
People keep saying email has encryption, but in the rare cases when email is encrypted with pgp, only the contents of the messages get encrypted. Not the metadata. And apparently the metadata is the most valuable data for government snoops. They don't care as much what you've been saying, but knowing that you've been emailing back and forth weekly with some person of interest over the last 5 years is what they're really after.
Also pgp doesn't support any of signal's key ratcheting or deniability. And the web of trust leaks information publicly about who your contacts are! (And its vulnerable to Sybil attacks.)
Don't get be wrong, I love email and think its great. But it doesn't hold a candle to Signal when it comes to secure communication.
The same features are just not available. And messages may arrive sometime between 2 second and 2 days with no indication what happened. (Yes, highly skewed towards 2s, until you get graylisted)
Some time ago I bookmarked this comment by tptacek:
> Everyone I talk to uses Signal; even my siblings, who are not technologists and who I do not talk to about this stuff, use Signal (sometimes to my annoyance, since iMessage works just fine when we're figuring out what each of us is bringing to dinner). But for the purposes of this post, almost literally any secure messenger is better than email.
Hopefully the fact that even tptacek can admit that convenience actually plays a role when deciding what messaging platform to use for everyday stuff can help certain people here lower their shoulders somewhat ;-)
As I stated in a reply, so many people on some countries and communities rely on Whatsapp for essential comms. This role used to be filled by SMS, but now people expect a better experience. Why hasn't an alternative to SMS been created yet? We should not be relying on private tech giants to provide this essential service. There should be a fully end-to-end encrypted messaging service, supported by all Telecom providers, that is available by default with all cell plans. Data is now king, and almost all cell towers now have a data connection. We hasn't this problem been solved yet? We've essentially outsourced the creation of this critical infrastructure to companies that want to sell our data.
I don't think many people will be disagreeing with you, but for now, and for those of us who don't have the skills to solve the problem, we are left to look for the best option that is available.
You've correctly identified all the problems and what should be done ... are you going to work on it?
If not, why not? Perhaps the answer to that will tell you why, as far as we know, nobody is working on it.
Sure as heckfire none of the big telecoms providers are going to bother.
Unfortunately I think it's one of those situations where the existing tech is "good enough" and there is not profit incentive to make it better. There is an incentive to amass a large user base (with associated network graph) so you can achieve a high valuation, but there is no incentive to create a new messaging protocol that can sit on top of the cell network.
If anything, this is a task for non-profit orgs like the IEEE, IETF, EFF, etc. to be working on and funding.
It would (have been?) interesting to know who isn't switching anywhere (and/or not considering to switch)
Also, I can't seem to find anything about a messenger named Zom, do you mean Zoom? If so, is Zoom really something people use for the same use case as Whatsapp?
Not switching, because switching won't change anything except for me not being able to message anyone anymore. WhatsApp has become the national messaging platform in my country. Giving it up would be like giving up SMS 20 years ago.
I'm not switching anywhere. Maybe I could get my closest friends to switch, but WhatsApp is so absolutely ubiquitous that I know I'll continue using it to chat with others, that's how I've been contacting contractors, clients, where we have interest groups....I'll start switching over when people I know do.
More and more companies are integrating with Whatsapp and building on the assumption that the majority has or will install it. And as they continue layering on the convenience of being a payments platform alongside Libra/Diem, it becomes another WeChat, and eventually you may require it to do everyday purchases, company interactions, bookings, etc. This is especially true in emerging/unbanked regions. Signal/Telegram/etc are focused on being messengers, while Whatsapp is part of a broader, increasingly indispensable platform and network, with social hooks. I worry the choice will be made for us as to whether we install it or not, since only a minority care about privacy.
One of the killer features to me is being able to use a client on many varied systems (phone, tablet, computer), which my chat history shared between them. This allows me to very easily get messages anywhere, and pick up the conversation anywhere.
Telegram and Wire for sure will work for this. Signal is also ok, with clients on different devices, but it’s still lacking in reliability and has some messaging issues.
For example, on Signal, I got a message from someone I hadn’t messaged for a long, long time asking me to re-send my message because they saw a “bad message” error. I have no idea what that was about.
Signal will sync your message history from the point you link multiple devices (not those sent/received prior to that), but no tablet support (unless you're talking about iPad).
Telegram, because it more widespread and because it runs in parallel on multiple devices. That's the major flaw of WhatsApp even if it's dictated by strong encryption etc.
However everybody around me use WhatsApp, including the people using Telegram. I use Telegram with 3 or 4 friends, WhatsApp with everybody else even if I see a constant flow of contacts installing Telegram (the app sends a notification.) The only viable migration path is that enough people start using both until a tipping point when most of their conversations happen on Telegram. Same for any other platform. An abrupt switch is impossible unless WhatsApp start charging money or is banned by law.
Here in India everyone uses WhatsApp, from grandmas and children to teachers, office workers and even Police officers. It serves versatile purposes, of hosting both a chat platform and a social network for groups and has been so much ingrained in India's societies that "texting" literally means sending a WhatsApp message here. In state elections, WhatsApp is the main platform the ruling party (BJP) focused most of its campaigns on. With such a setup it is extremely difficult to move to another platform.
The next popular platform is Telegram, but it is used mainly to share and access pirated movies and apps from shady channels than for everyday communication.
The Signal Foundation was formed a couple of years ago with a $50 million chunk from the founder of WhatsApp. That should’ve helped a lot, though I don’t know how much.
Big fan of Quill as well (https://quill.chat) — it is marketed towards teams, but you can use it just like Telegram & others to DM others without needing to create a team.
It's a shame that iMessage isn't an option (for users, not in the poll!). It's nothing like a perfect option, but if anything is going to beat WhatsApp for mindshare it's something from Apple which already has an enormous non-tech userbase.
I know the reflex answer is "they won't do it because iPhone exclusivity sells iPhones" but suspect that's increasingly only true in the US.
People here are describing how phones there are increasingly WhatsApp-running platforms, and Apple would be wise to prevent that while it can. Might also offer them an upsell route for their other cross-platform services.
Some analogue variants for different communication scenarios I heard of, but can't comply since i am nerd:
- in your neighborhood, same street, also from hill to hill: SHOUTING or YELLING (if just for signalling things, FIRE works also)
- bit farther away: SCREAM LOUDER (just signals, more noise, like twitter)
- same city: write on PAPER, drive bicycle and insert into mailbox (afterwards drive home)
- other city/country: CALL BY PHONE (moment of silence when waiting for answer is tense)
- all above but addressing many people: the above ONE AFTER THE OTHER
I'll also jump on the band wagon that deleting it is a bit of a bad idea as much as i hate facebook too, but if you actually read the full terms and privacy you can opt out of moat things and they only really effect you if you have other services in the "facebook company" group much like how google tracks you across everything with their ad ID it's the same with facebook.
read the terms and privacy thoroughly and you'll see it's not all that bad and this is coming from a strong hater of facebook
It doesn't matter. Remember, before acquisition their main revenue plan was to charge $1/year/user. WhatsApp biggest selling point was that it promised it would not have ads and it would be focused on privacy.
End-to-end encryption came despite Facebook. Its founder left when it was clear that Facebook planned to leverage WhatsApp userbase into other Facebook properties despite promises of the contrary.
Now they are actually executing on it. The only action that can have any effect on Facebook is if they start losing users over this.
What are people’s thoughts on Line? It’s very widely used here in Japan, especially among younger people. I have used it only a little myself and don’t have much of an opinion one way or another.
Is there any texting app that doesn't require access to your address book on iOS?
I simply don't trust a single one of the messaging apps that they won't immediately upload my entire address book to their servers so they can have a more complete social graph.
I've tried Telegram at one point but it was a huge pain to use if you didn't let it access your contacts (or maybe it didn't work at all... my memory's fuzzy on which messaging apps were which.) Whatsapp was similarly awful as well.
Oh I'm aware I can revoke access to contacts (or in my case, never allow it in the first place.) I'm just saying the user experience is broken when you don't allow it.
Telegram won't let you just add contacts locally within the app (ie. stored privately within the Telegram app.) WhatsApp I think had a similarly bad experience. You try to tap "Add contact" and it just tries to access your device contacts again. No thanks.
I want my chat apps to have their own database of contacts, with basic CRUD for adding/removing them, which stays in that app. I don't need them getting a dump of the hundreds of contacts I have on my phone so that they can upload all of it to their servers and "suggest" friends (and likely, sell the data.)
Hosting my contact information on their servers and using invite codes/etc would work fine too (especially if it's pseudonymous.) But no, you can't get a dump of my whole contact database just so I can keep track of who I talk to.
I wish I could switch to Telegram, sadly most people I know use it as a "secondary" chat app for random/funny groups rather than their main app. What's even sadder is that I think most of us can agree that most people really don't care about privacy issues when it comes to apps, most "regular" people just want to use them for the sake of it. It's just people really focused on their privacy or "techies" the ones that have a concern about it.
In France, it is well known that the president and a lot of members of the leading political party are personally using Telegram.
I like a lot Telegram, even if I'm a little bit sad that they don't do more to push end to end encryption. One can have a look at cryptpad to see that cloud storage and e2e is possible.
But still, so far, for so long, there never was any proof of any deceptive behavior of the telegram team.
Not a single private message leaked to a gov, company or anyone. So I kind of trust them for the moment.
I've been a Threema user for over 7 years now and I have my most important contacts there.
Telegram is no E2E-Messenger. I know you can enable it per chat, but that's so solution. And groups are always not encrypted. Also they use some non-standard encryption. Why?
Signal needs my phone number. I dislike that idea.
I use Discord for anything unimportant. I prefer to not use it though. For voice I still prefer TeamSpeak, because of the end to end encryption and self hosting.
Unfortunately Signal is just a poor application. There are frequent bugs and after a while push notifications stopped working for me. (Pixel 3a, Android).
Telegram is really popular in some countries and is a more convenient for me as well because of that.
Just one thing to keep in mind: it is run by VK.com's original "creator" and that social network reportedly had (and still has) very close relationships with Russian agencies. It is surprising how easily people forget about such things as soon as people turn into "opposition" and leave the country and/or their main business.
> Verification codes are currently delayed across several providers because so many new people are trying to join Signal right now (we can barely register our excitement). We are working with carriers to resolve this as quickly as possible. Hang in there.
Yes. But with the new contacts, when I message them, will fb see that number? (I’m guessing yes, since all the address book does it match names to numbers)
The switch doesn't have to happen overnight, for all contacts and groups. And you can just run them next to each other.
People have just switched messengers in the past fine; ICQ -> MSN -> google chat / fb messenger (and I probably forgot a few). I agree that Whatsapp has become more "critical infrastructure" than messengers were, but don't give up right away because it seems impossible
just finally installed matrix on my phone, been using it on desktop on and off for years. never used whatsapp in the first place but the way i see it, where i live e2e f whatsapp is worthless, harmful even because you cannot express dissent as our kyc compliant phone is linked. same for telegram and signal. i might end up setting up my own matrix server but will see about that.
Having said that, I think its ideal use cases at the current time are probably less of a general messaging solution with friends, and more for specific scenarios where off-internet and security is maybe most salient.
Telegram. Been using it for years. I regret that they try to implement features that are not core to the IM world, like their support for voice or video calls that are really junky and buggy --- but overall it’s a great tool, accessible on all platforms without being tied to your phone (like the web version of Whatsapp).
As long as I can be far away from the Facebook world, I’m happy.
Most enterprise software companies have data privacy clauses in their contracts. The sharing of customer contact data may put corporate phone holders in breach of contracts. Prudence suggests that software companies at least should prevent all staff from using WhatsApp until their customers have agreed to it.
And same would go for tiktok as it too also grabs your contacts.
Is there a way to use Signal or the rest as your main messenger app or are you just forced to use two apps if you want to communicate to non-Signalers?
I know it’s a really elementary question when the rest of you are looking at this from a high-level (great discussion btw) but I’m never ever going to convince anyone to use anything but iOS messenger if they need two apps.
Whatsapp still hasn't made it to my US-based circles whatsoever, from ATL, Chicago, NY, STL, to Seattle. I downloaded it when I went on a Europe trip in 2016, and haven't used it since. I have a single group chat on Telegram full of mostly Europeans. I predominately use iMessage/SMS, FB messenger, and Discord with my local friend groups.
I tried to replace WhatsApp with Signal, by telling all my frequent WhatsApp contacts I'm moving to signal and they should download it if they want to talk to me.
About 10% of contacts moved to Signal. I lost touch with the rest and Signal was in many ways worse than WhatsApp for everyday communication.
I ended up using WhatsApp again. For me, it's too popular to leave.
Although I use WhatsApp as my main messaging app, as it is the common practice in my country, I always thought Telegram was way better - it was honestly always 20 steps ahead of WhatsApp in regard to features, and it still is.
I hope everyone will switch to it, although unfortunately I believe people will just stay with WhatsApp...
I’ve been trying to avoid using WhatsApp since it became Facebook but sadly almost everyone (no it’s everyone) I commmunicate with uses it and doesn’t care what happens to their data. I await the day when something significant occurs that gives the masses that push they need to switch to alternative privacy focused communication.
The answer is "none of the above": instead, antitrust regulators in the US (after Jan. 20) and the EU force the breakup of Facebook, restoring WhatsApp's status as an independent company focused on privacy. The WhatsApp users get to keep their preferred platform and Facebook doesn't get the data.
I'd like to get people to use Signal, but it has been a losing effort. I either need to use WhatsApp or not communicate with friends and family. That's the problem with network effects.
I use signal and ~like it, but I do wish it didn't require a phone #, and tie everything to that #, when I switched phones I had to make a new signal account & make new group chat rooms.
Also signal needs group video chats..
I've never used WhatsApp so I don't know what is so special that so many people seem to use it.
I've never heard of Threema and Zom before, so I checked them. Zom is... well, just another messenger. Threema on the other hand looks very interesting, but it's a paid app - I don't know if any app will be able to pull what WhatsApp had with it's $1 pricing.
Maybe a dumb question, but: If we all switch to Signal, then again one entity will have the power, right? As far as I understand it their protocol is not open in the sense that we can build custom clients and servers still interact with others on other servers (Like Matrix, or Email, or Mastodon)?
If you care about encryption telegram is not a good option, it shouldn't be presented as an alternative IMO, neither should discord. Signal is the only real alternative if you care about your chats being encrypted-- I heard matrix is e2e encrypted also so maybe that's another choice...
Why isn't Skype suggested more often? I've been using it instead of Zoom very successfully. I've moved a lot of my family over to it for our pandemic get togethers. It works very well as a generic messaging platform.
Microsoft in my opinion is a far more respectable company compared to Facebook.
I switched away from Skype when Microsoft bought it because there was something fishy (They converted it from P2P, which worked quite well, to MS-owned servers). I wish someone would leak the pre-MS source code.
I would say encrypted P2P is not a requirement for 99% of users. If you require such a level of security then you really shouldn't be using someone else's infrastructure. I include signal and telegram in this.
With text messages (even though insecure) they cross provider, cross platform, distributed, and interface based so clients and servers could be written.
With the new options they are single provider, centralized, and locked in. Matrix is an exception in some categories.
It's kinda sad how the technology landscape shifted.
Let's say I absolutely must use WhatsApp to communicate with someone for a work situation. What's the best way that doesn't involve allowing Facebook to plunder all my data? Is my only option to get a burner phone? They seem to require a SIM card from what I can tell.
Sorry, too much "privacy" with Signal! I want to have continuous history of my conversations, but Signal does not allow for it. Also, it's the worst SMS client and, in fact, I've lost text messages due to its "privacy", which I didn't ask for.
It's not about the app, it's about the network. I can easily switch an app. The 100+ people I would reach don't have any of those apps, a few have Signal. If I tried to get them to switch, they will state exactly the reason I just did. The network is strong.
XMPP isn't a chat app, it's a protocol. If you want a chat app then you need to list clients. Which client would you use?
And xxxx/XMPP isn't on the list because when I last looked (which was some time ago) everything was unusable for muggles, same with Matrix. Responses to this poll have convinced me that the landscape has changed, although most of the suggestions are still inappropriate for someone who just want to use something, without having to understand everything about the underlying protocols.
So, back to XMPP, or Matrix. Which client would you use/recommend?
Well, for Android at least, the one I mentioned, Conversations ?
BTW, I use it with my mom. And even though I was the one that set up her XMPP account at https://jabber.lqdn.fr/my/create.php , as you can see it's quite straightforward to do ! (And other servers might have an even easier, more mobile friendly version by now, IIRC Conversations itself is suggesting one ?)
It is encrypted, uses email under the hood, and they have a large amount of funding as I understand it. The independence and cross-provider nature of this option means whatever email provider you use, they get very limited data about you and your contacts.
Moved to signal today, plenty of people in my contacts are following suit (was way easier than I thought). I've never had a facebook account, had WhatsApp before facebook bought them. I will also have to jailbreak or dump my oculus quest if they force me to sign up.
Line (https://line.me ) is pretty popular in several Asian countries, so I started to use it during my time there. Its desktop app is really good, so now I'm sticking with it whenever possible.
Is it encrypted? It's really annoying that modern chat apps without end to end encryption are even a thing. This is a solved problem now, several open source, drop in replacements exist to secure messaging.
It'll be really sad if a bunch of people leave WhatsApp, which actually had good encryption, for services that don't even try to protect users.
Matrix is really great as a protocol They can do call , photo uploadinf etc.
But be careful with them. I have lost message with them. One client show the message, the other wont. And a scary room update process. I always scare of losing message with their Element client.
I was looking at signal and telegram. Telegram was easier for family crowd and it has all necessary features for easy transition. Literally over a day I persuaded successfully all my active groups to move over to telegram. It was that simple.
I'm curious to get people's take on how they are approaching this migration.
One thing that I am considering is keeping WhatsApp around without leaving any of my groups, but making very strong efforts to only send new messages through my new service.
A messaging app is not a personal choice like using Debian or FreeBSD, it is about community.
I have iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram on my phone. Each one is used to reach a certain group of people. I also have Signal, but nobody is on there and I never use it.
I am going to try to move my family to Matrix (via Element.io). I really hate the walled gardens. The fact that people still use email addresses from decades ago is pretty good proof of the powers of federation. Wish me luck :)
I'm crazy - but for quite a long time I am thinking about setting up something like my own instance of jabber and give credentials to my loved ones... Maybe there are better alternatives than jabber, as long as I can host it myself.
What about Tox or something like that? What about Jabber?
By the way, bare e-mail is usually enough if you omit bloated signatures and quotations and just send short messages that way. There even is a Telegram clone which actually is an e-mail client.
Couldn't we have an open-messaging standard so that different apps can send messages to each other? Similar to open banking in the UK (law). Of course, the big players won't want that, but the smaller ones could start it.
I wish one of them had something like the WhatsApp statuses. It's one of the main conversation starters for me and reasons why I stay on WhatsApp. If Signal were to get statuses, I'd probably switch immediately.
Stopped using WhatsApp 2 years ago. I can contact most people in telegram but I’d like to uninstall soon. They make it hard, you need 1 month inactivity. This means 1 month of potentially lost messages you will never see.
From a security perspective, Signal seems like the winner. I just wish they'd invest in better design/UX across the board especially their desktop app. Their app looks and feels like a boilerplate Electron app.
The killer feature missing from all those is group video chat. This is what Messenger offers and why I will never be able to move my family away from it unless there is an equally smooth alternative.
Conversations (on Android) and Gajim (on the desktop) does video chat works quite well in my experience. They have a paid service you can use with it, or it's compatible with any Jabber/XMPP compatible messaging service.
Telegram seems to have the best client applications for all platforms. Very fast, very light, low memory footprint. Personally, this is my favorite of all the messaging apps / clients I've used
The problem with signal is also no buttons, carousels or bots etc. I mean if we switch anyways, it would be nice to have something that can compete with wechat, nut just be a better sms application.
Have to keep in mind that WhatsApp's customer base is not the western world, but mainly growing economies like India and African countries. WhatsApp recently rolled out Payments feature in India. In fact WhatsApp for Business is pretty good for SME to conduct business in India. Some of the shops that I went to India has paperless receipts and digital payments thru WhatsApp and UPI. They ask your WhatsApp number by default and sends you the receipt on WhatsApp. I find that very convenient as a customer. The horse has left the barn. Good luck asking people to switch to Signal or Telegram there. Switching to others will only help in making a political statement but wont help in mass adoption at least in those countries.
I know for example that in Norway you will encounter tons of people who have never even heard of WhatsApp. They just use iMessage as most people there have iPhones and I bet some people just think of it as an SMS (just happens to work much better).
IRC. IRC has been around for the rise and fall of everything else on your list, and a dozen more that we've already forgotten. I have used IRC for my entire life and I see no reason to switch.
As much as I love IRC, it is fundamentally incompatible with the way people use
IM these days. Even if you gloss over the lack of "modern" features, you're
still going to have a very hard time with vanilla IRC on mobile where keeping a
persistent background socket open is frowned upon (if not outright illegal).
Don't get me wrong - I love IRC, and have used it as my primary social network
for years. And after spending a full decade trying to switch people over to open
protocols, I've found the hard way that the network effect trumps all.
I just don't see the average Whatsapp user ever switching to IRC.
I voted for Signal however i am wondering how signal is any different. My concern mainly rises from the "fact" that "If You're Not Paying For It, You Become The Product"
The problem with switching from Whatsapp is that it's not you alone who has to switch, it's everybody else. If you have a way to make all my family, friends and colleagues, let me know
I will not be taking action based on this. I use Facebook and Instagram regularly as do literally everyone I interact with. I have zero concern about integration between Facebook and Whatsapp.
Signal and Matrix are the most trustworthy options. What's the point in using them if no one you know does? WhatsApp is valuable despite its proprietary nature because everyone uses it.
Depends what you want. Are you all about personal privacy? I'd say Signal or Matrix on a self hosted server. Convenience and access to some other communities? Discord would be my pick.
I'm already switching to Telegram after losing my phone. It's been a month and I haven't yet recovered my original number, losing many contacts and messages in the process.
I think Telegram is the superior IM currently being developed but if you want to switch due to privacy reasons than you can just stay on whatsapp, it will not really improve anything.
Matrix as soon as they support short voice messages. My parents use voice messages to communicate with me so anything without voice messages is a no go.
I vote for Telegram as well. You can't use Signal without a cellphone... and cellphones are a privacy nightmare. I activated Telegram with a burner phone number, and I don't have to keep the phone on to use Telegram on desktop or online. I never shared any contact with Telegram, and I added everybody manually. You don't have to give your number to be added on telegram, you can use an @handle. A a lot of people among my friends are organically switching to telegram.
Actually, you can do the burner phone thing with Signal too. With Telegram, whoever gets that number later (if you discard it) can possibly also get your account and messages (though you’d get a warning). With Signal, even if someone did that, they wouldn’t get your past conversations and your account would get disabled the moment the other person activates.
That would tell me that you would switch to use none, or that you currently don't use anything, or that you wouldn't switch from your current system, but it doesn't give me any advice to pass on to my friends, who do use WhatsApp, want not to use WhatsApp, and need to use something.
So providing those options wouldn't help me, although it's otherwise interesting to note that you'd vote "none".
I think you can use those options as advice to your friends. The advice would be to "not switch" or "use nothing". Both of those are valid advice and "none" is the advice I'm giving friends and relatives from now on.
Neither "Not Switching" nor "Use None" are viable options, which is why they aren't included. I appreciate that they are the advice you would give, but it would be unhelpful for them. They need something, and it needs not to be WhatsApp. That's why I didn't include those as options in the poll.
But I appreciate (and am sympathetic towards) your stance.
As much as I would like to resist, I will have to surrender and accept the new terms for WhatsApp. The network effect is so big here, that none really bother using anything else. Just checked my address book, and I have 100+ contacts using WhatsApp, ~15 on Viber, ~15 on Telegram and ~10 on Signal, and I don't care much about most of those people on other messengers.
To be honest, this is a very pointless poll. I barely heard about Signal and never even used it. Discord is the thing kids use for gaming.
Whatsapp became a standard non-carrier app to communicate globally. People do not even know any of these apps. Removing whatsapp from the phone means disconnecting from many remote friends and family members.
Forget about them all and send a regular SMS message. If the above doesn't work for essentially no cost then your phone provider needs to get it's head out of it's rear and stop raping you... There is no excuse for the way phone companies charge...
If you need anonymous, then none of the above really work either.
Honestly, this is my choice as of now. I don't really use IM all that much, so it's not a big deal for me from privacy standpoint, but I'm not going to switch to yet another centralized service. I'd probably be alone there anyway, I doubt most of my contacts will care about this.
I'll wait for a distributed E2E IM or death from old age, whichever comes first.
> I've had that response several times, but XMPP is not a messaging app. It's like asking for an email client and being told "Use the internet", or "Use TCP".
> Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the response, but it's not answering the question I'm asking.
> What app running on top of XMPP would you suggest?
It doesn't support ios. Some of my friends are on that platform.
I also installed the android client and it wanted permission for the camera, files and I think the microphone. I didn't grant it any of them and it then refused to work. So it got uninstalled.
A messaging app has to be able to work without any permission except for network access and maybe the contact book.
Why is there no option for staying with WhatsApp? My reality is that none of my friends and family will care enough to switch, so whether I like it or not I'm stuck.
In some alternate future, WhatsApp’s founders never sold to Facebook and the world is enjoying the use of a popular secure encrypted messaging platform.
It would be helpful if, instead of just throwing out names, you also provided links. "Line" and "imo" are rather difficult to search for, and since you already know (of) them I'd assume you can provide links.
It would also be helpful if you could provide brief reasons as to why one would choose one of those as opposed to, say, Signal or blabber/XMPP, for example.
WhatsApp is bad. They are owned by a data collection company notorious for gross privacy violations. Both the client apps and the server are completely closed source, which means either could be spying on you without any way to know. They do claim to implement the secure Signal Protocol, but how do you verify end to end encryption without seeing source code, anyway?
Telegram is a perfectly adequate choice. The user experience is similar to WhatsApp. It does practice some dark patterns - end to end encryption is only available in "secret chats" and calls, which means all other messages you send are readable by anyone with a warrant - and has had some high-profile exploits over the years, but the current iteration of its cryptographic protocol has been proved secure [1] (disclaimer: the paper claiming so came out within the last month, and I haven't found any discussion or review). All of the client apps are open source. The server is not, but if the clients are properly encrypting messages, that shouldn't be a security concern (To my knowledge. I am not a cryptographer).
Discord is community-oriented. It's primarily based around "guilds" (commonly referred to as servers) that function similar to Slack workspaces. A robust role-based permission systems has made it pretty much the de facto standard for large communities wanting a real-time discussion platform (think subreddits, Discourse forums, etc). They have some top-of-the-line engineers who sometimes publish cool blog posts about their ridiculously performant clients [2]. Nonetheless, nothing is encrypted, they aren't open-source, and they have an unclear monetization model [3].
Signal is designed, intentionally or not, as a SMS replacement. It's build around one on one and small group messages. Their encryption is strong, independently verified, and enabled by default (Signal falls back to SMS for others who don't use it). Think iMessage, but open-source and secure. You'll see HN complain about its UI from time to time, but really, it's quite good. It's also extremely easy to convince friends and family to switch to.
Matrix aims to be to real time chat what email is for asynchronous communication. Rather than a service, it's a standard, which means you'll see swaths of clients strewn about GitHub and other websites, the most feature complete of which is Element [4]. In practice (or for the time being), Matrix is just better IRC. VoIP and video calls are somewhat hodge-poged into the spec, but do work well, and encryption by default has been rolling out over the past year. Direct messaging, group chats, and communities are also all supported, although the latter suffers from the IRC-like limitation of only one "channel" per server.
In the past, zom was a XMPP client [0]. From what I can see on GitHub, the new version builds on Matrix [1], so there shouldn't be a separate answer for zom.
I've had that response several times, but XMPP is not a messaging app. It's like asking for an email client and being told "Use the internet", or "Use TCP".
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the response, but it's not answering the question I'm asking.
What app running on top of XMPP would you suggest?
Quicksy is a decent jump from WhatsApp to XMPP for Android users (based on Conversations, but with contact discovery). For iOS there's Siskin or Monal.
XMPP has a wide and diverse ecosystem. I am working on curating a suite of XMPP software (a server you can self-host, and an app for each major platform) to produce a single tightly integrated "XMPP package": https://snikket.org/ (and https://snikket.org/about/goals/ for an idea of current progress).
Telegram is to messengers what Emacs is to text editors.
- Unlimited storage that doesn't expire
- Complete API access. There are many alternative Telegram clients because of this, and the official clients are opensource, too.
- Native clients for all the major platforms (macOS even has two official native clients), including a web client. All clients work without needing to link up with a phone. There are unofficial clients for the terminal and Emacs, as well.
- Good support (best I've seen) for sending text, images, audio, links, etc.
- The above combined with support for one-to-many "channels" has enabled a very rich ecosystem of personal microblogs (ala Tumblr) alongside official news channels. (As this needs networks effects, the ecosystem might not be strong in English. I only follow https://t.me/techmemenews and https://t.me/tldrnewsletter in English, which are bridges to some non-Telegram newsletters I have built myself.) There are also a lot of channels that "liberate" "information", such as https://t.me/HeadSpaceChannel .
- Those channels are also great for private note-taking.
- Ability to selectively export data to HTML (good for human viewing) or JSON. There once was an unofficial terminal app that exported to sqlite, but the maintainer gave up after this feature was added to the official clients. Nonetheless, exporting data via the API is still an option.
- Multiaccount support
- An open and free-as-in-beer ecosystem for (potentially animated) stickers, which has resulted in some really creative stickers, and where one can find stickers for most niche interests.
- Multi-device usage (Signal only works on a single phone)
- Seamless device switching, courtesy of not having E2E on by default. One also doesn't lose history.
- A lot of small quality-of-life features, such as: Video profile avatars; Granular settings for notifications, storage, privacy, ...; Ability to group chats into folders; Ability to group files (including photos and videos) into a single post; Animated emojis; Ability to pin chats to the top; "Instant view" that lets you read a cleaned version of articles in Telegram itself; Rich link previews; Scheduled message posts; ...
- E2E chats are available when you want them, and you can even set a self-destruct on your posts.
- You can fully use Telegram without revealing your phone number to anyone.
- Great support for groups and their administration, and you can always use bots if you want some niche feature.
- Group voice chats
- Acceptable search through everything in your history. (I am not up to speed on what the competition offers.)
Why close? Just setup Matrix with bridges. I have mine bridges to Messenger, Hangouts, Telegram and I'm working on getting my Twilio bridge so it can do SMS too:
I use Telegram because in the Linux group on Google+ it was advertised as the better messenging alternative, and a while ago Russia wanted access to their data and when they refused some IPs were blocked by the Russian government.
Idk if that was just a market trick or if it was real.
In Telegram you don't get censored.
But it lacks the essential blocking people feature.
Edit: if you would like to avoid constant switching in the future, you have to think long-term and consider a distributed network, not another walled garden.
You are completely missing the point of todays discussion, it's not about who can distribute binaries or implement client. It's about not giving Facebook more data.
From this point of view you can switch anywhere. But if you would like to avoid constant switching in the future, you have to think long-term and consider a distributed network, not another walled garden.
The issue is that it gives Signal a lot of control. Don't like some new or existing behaviour of the client? With Matrix you can just use an alternative client. And there is a growing ecosystem of them. With Signal you have to use it whether you want to or not.
Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.